Ohhh, yeah, I see why Fat Cerberus was mentioning the specs now. Have you looked into getting the latest graphics drivers for your GeForce specifically? Even with those specs I imagine that a GeForce 7100 or 8400 should do the trick when I can do everything I need on Intel integrated graphics. But I dunno.

That's weird, my understanding was that you just needed shader support which means OpenGL 2.0 or higher - a quick google says that a geforce 7100 should support opengl 2.0 no problem maybe it was a driver problem with the old card?

edit: semi-ninja'd by DaVince

The 7100 is integrated into the motherboard, there was no old card. When I setup the machine, I made sure to have the updated drivers. Since I added the 8400 graphics card, miniSphere's graphics perform much smoother. I'm not really sure what was causing the slowdown in graphics but now I do have to figure a way to re-enable my dual monitors. The desktop environment is just way too cluttered now. It is a wonder how people were ever accustomed to a 640x480 resolution back in the early days of computing.

It is a wonder how people were ever accustomed to a 640x480 resolution back in the early days of computing.

Funny you bring that up, because I deliberately held out on 800x600 for a long time (as in, long after that was below the minimum requirements to run Windows).  I liked the coziness I think, anything higher at the time felt like I was swimming.   Nowadays I go crazy with anything less than 1080p though.

Computers have come along way since I first started using them, dialing in to Prodigy with a 24.4kbps modem on a 386 machine. For a long time, I was stuck with a max res of 1024x768. It was all my graphics card and monitor would support. That was when I first set up a dual monitor system which then evolved to a tri-monitor system. Since this machine had the dual monitor support integrated, I reverted back but I upped my monitors to 2 24" with native resolution of 1920x1080. Yet, as large a resolution as it is, with the 8400 graphics card I'm stuck at 1 monitor (for the time being) and find the desktop environment very cluttered.