Game runs very choppy and very low FPS

So I just reinstalled guild wars from over a year ago (before nightfall came out) and noticed they added a handy fps meter. I've noticed over the past few days that I am getting a terrible FPS of 15-30 (probably 10-15 in 8v8). I'm not sure what's causing the problem, but I think it is my RAM. Anyways, here are system specs:

Pentium 4 3.07 GHz
448 RAM (I am thinking about adding 1 gig to this if it will fix my fps issues)
ATI Mobility IGP 9000

Not sure what other specs are used, but do you guys think I can get my fps up to 40-60 if I added 1 gig of RAM or is there something else I need to do? I'm also trying to power defrag to see if it helps the lag.

Blame the 4Million people all wanting to get in on Preview GW:EN over the weekend....

Both the video card and RAM may have something to do with low framerates.

Lack of RAM typically causes heavy hard drive access during the game, which generally slows things down and causes annoying hitches because the hard drive is multiple orders of magnitude slower compared to RAM when it comes to data transfer rates and response speed. If this is happening a lot extra RAM could help. Defragging will improve hard drive performance a bit so try that too, and be sure to shut down any unnecessary programs running in the background to free as much RAM as possible for the game.

Your comp sounds like a laptop so you probably can't replace the video hardware, but you can determine if your video card is to blame by finding some relatively static scenes that run badly, and changing the resolution while observing the FPS. If dropping the screen resolution has a large positive effect on the frame rate the video card is too slow.

Hmm, I tried changing the resolution from max to minimum and the FPS was around 25-30, as opposed to the usual 10-20. It seemed to max out at 30 though, I only saw it go up to 32 once. However, I don't think I can play on any resolution other than the highest one because of my interface. Even on the lowest resolution, the game was still a bit choppy so I'm wondering if this was because of my 448 RAM. My Graphics card met the system recommendations for prophecies and factions, but is in between the required and recommended specs for nightfall and eye of the north. I also just defragged yesterday with a program called Power Defragmentator overnight. I think my graphics card uses my normal RAM too, which is what put me at 448 (512-64).

So do you guys think if I dished out $100 for a 1 gig RAM upgrade and installation that my gw would perform better? Does anybody have similar system specs and what FPS do you think I could get?

That has absolutely nothing to do with this guy's problem. GW:EN might need more juice from your vid card, but 4 million people have 0.0 impact on your pc. If you mean that there were crowded districts..go to kamadan or lion's arch..they're equal in numbers.

Yea, this is a problem I've been having since I re-installed guild wars (which was about 2 weeks ago). Anyways, I just took a screenshot of some memory usage graphs. Can anybody confirm that my very low memory is the problem (not my ATI Mobility IGP 9000) and with a 1 gig upgrade the game will run smoothly on the highest resolution (with min. detail settings)?

The first one is when I loaded up guild wars and was just running around in RA before I entered the mission.

The second one is when I actually entered an RA game. As you can see, my CPU Usage was maxed out until I exited guild wars a few moments later.

I wasn't having an problems on my laptop (dual-core cpu, 2 gigs of ram, nvidia card) until the sneak preview weekend, but now I'm having the same problem with choppiness that the op is. Are you sure it has nothing to do with the extra server load for the weekend event?

Well, those images I attached were from after the preview weekend was over and I had been having problems before that too. Also, your laptop has 2 gigs of RAM and mine only has 448 (which doesn't even meet the system requirements for nightfall). So yes, I am quite sure it has nothing to do with the gwen preview.

You need a better 3D card . Get that first and then see what RAM does after.

Well the problem is I have a laptop so I don't know if I can even get a better 3d card.