Any tips for improving gaming performance in XP?

The best options, more RAM and faster video, aren’t really an option for you. Although there are lots of tweaks you can do in WinXP that help a little, they’re usually only going to make tiny incremental improvements. I’d say there’s probabaly not much to do but try turning down the game video settings. Giving the Mac less work to do will make performance snappier at the expense of visual quality. Sounds like time to think about some new gear.

Try looking at the drivers for your video and make sure that they are up to date. A lot of games will be slow and not work as hoped for if you have old drivers.

What games are you looking at in specific?

Have updated to the latest version of Boot Camp?

Hmm. I have a similar situation :D

I run Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro, which also has 2GB RAM, along with a 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. Also an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card, with 512 MB of VRAM for that.

I got boot camp to play games as well, but I found I like Windows better so I used it all the time, which is unfortunate due to how I partitioned my hard drive 40/80 in favor of the Mac partition. :(

Basically, as far as I can tell, just tweak the settings on individual games so that it can handle it well. My MacBook I described here could handle Oblivion at pretty darn good framerates with the settings I didn’t care about at all turned way down. Other things I did care about were left in the “pretty good looking” range and it ran just fine. It’s all about balance with these things.

Thanks for the tips. Everything is totally up to date (sans microsoft updates). But boot camp and all it’s drivers are current.

Its weird because the issues I have go like this: playing just fine then randomly it jerks, and never recovers as if the settings are suddenly too high. Restarting the game (Red Orchestra) fixes it.

That specifically sounds like a VRAM overload right there. If it’s loaded too much texture stuff, then eventually your VRAM can’t handle it. Restarting the game would more or less clear all of that out of there and then it would run fine on reboot. Higher res texture use way more VRAM, and the more textures, the harder it is. If there’s a setting to use lower-res textures, try it. That or upgrade your graphics card. What card is it, by the way?