Stupid Inspiron 8200

[intexity]

I recently bought a used inspiron 8200 with a pentium 4 2 ghz and 1 gig ram. i ended up getting a geforce4 440 64 mb video card. here is my short list of problems. any help would be greatly appreciated.
1. Applications take straight from the processor without touching the ram. For example, load mozilla firefox and the cpu jumps from 2 percent to 30-60 percent as the ram idles at about 250 to 450 mb. the ram does not move more than 5-10 mb if that while the cpu goes nuts.
2. I can't seem to get the video card to work properly. reinstalled driver plenty of times with no avail.
im thinking that i need a new motherboard if i want it to work properly or just leave it the way it is cause since my latest build it has become my traveling jukebox. but any ways to test this out or possibly fix these things would be greatly appreciated.

Oh and yes i did use the dell diagnostics test and all came out clean as a whistle.

Thanks

Cory

 

[cfvh600]

why do you say the video card is not working properly?What does it do?The CPU will do some work when loading programs.You should get worried if the CPU usage stays at 100% all the time.

 

[intexity]

sorry about the delay my newest desktop build has been running me ragged
i had gotten some error when installing warcraft three and getting weird shading when trying to play other games but when i went back to check it out all is well must have been the last reinstall i did
as far as the cpu issue the cpu does all the work while the ram sits idle this is really my major concern since it does tend to make my laptop lag during process's
thanks for your time
cory