resozv:How about video card? What's recommended? How do I know what my computer has? Any way to boost it's performance or help reduce freeze & stutter?
First and foremost, make sure you have the update drivers for both your video card and sound card. If you have an older PC, you most likely have on-board video and sound. That's fine, but they update the drivers over the years. Manually finding the updated drivers can be tedious and time-consuming.
There are very good 3rd party applications out there that do the work for you but at a price. My suggestion is a program called Driver Detective. It scans your systems, searches the internet for you, and installs the drivers if you tell it.
Edit: I use this program and I believe it's $30
http://www.drivershq.com/