horrible kb/mouse lag, fps drops in battlefield 2

[apistat]

Before I start, here's my specs:

3.0ghz p4 with 800mhz fsb
ecs pt800ce-a mobo
512mb pc2100 ddr ram
geforce 6600 gt (agp version, 128mb if i remember correctly)
onboard sound
a few 7200rpm hard drives and a dvdrw
windows xp sp2

My problem is that when I get in a game my framerate is pretty weak (But certainly playable.. somewhere between 35 and 60 fps) and gets even worse (it seems to usually dip down to about 15fps) when I get near people/vehicles. In addition to this, the keyboard and mouse movement become so choppy that the game is completely unplayable.

Here's the part that confuses me: It used to work absolutely fine a few months ago. The only differences between when I last played when it worked fine are that I installed another hard drive and version 1.41 was released.

Here's everything I've tried so far, with little to no success:
Disconnected the new hard drive
Updated video card drivers
Updated via 4 in 1 drivers
Played from a mini-image instead of from the retail cd
Put the in-game video settings as low as possible
Tried it on both singleplayer and multiplayer
Defragged the drive that windows is on and the drive that battlefield is installed on
Cleared out the cache in the bf2 folder thats made in my documents

Just some other stuff I figured I would mention: The game isnt installed on the newer hard drive, Ive uninstalled and reinstalled bf2 a few times, I recently reformatted and reinstalled windows about a month ago so thats not likely causing the problems and most other stuff on my computer runs about as well as it should on a system like mine.

Any ideas? This is getting frustrating because it worked well before and now that I want to play again its busted. And seeing as how it worked fine and this seems to be a common response to many such problems, I'm going pre-emptively say that "you need to get more ram" is not the solution to this.

The next thing I'm thinking of doing is uninstalling the game then reinstalling and only patching up to 1.4, just to see if that version works... But I'd rather try some other stuff before doing something that time consuming.

Thanks.

[pharoah]

you need more ram seriously though if it suddenly has a problem heat may be the issue.try this http://www.techsupportforum.com/arti...rsviewpro.html post back your temps,and voltage readings.