Joint Operations - Slow Frame Rate...

OK i'll try to keep it brief.
About 10 weeks ago I downloaded the JO demo and was very impressed. However, I noticed that the frame rate was very slow on some of the larger servers, 64+. Servers of 100 or more were unplayable. My old set-up was: Radeon 9600 (256MB), 256MB SDRAM, duron 1.3 GHz CPU.
So I asked around in some forums and ppl said "Upgrade your RAM". SO I did. I upgraded to 512MB DDR. It made very little difference. So I then asked around some more and ppl said "Check for spyware! Defrag drive C! Scan for viruses! Bastardize your system settings!" All of which I did, but still to no effect.
I would just like to point out that I have a 512MB broadband connection.
SO yesterday I upgraded my CPU to an athlon XP2400+ and it did make some difference but not a huge amount. I can now play on 100 player maps but the frame rate is still very poor especially when I'm in the middle of the action. I even make sure that I close down all unneccessary processes using ctrl+alt+del.
My current set-up should be able to handle JO perfectly well considering that the min sys reqs are: 256MB RAM, 1.5GHz CPU. My graphics card is more than capable!
Basically I'm really pissed off because I pay £28 a month for my broadband connection and I've also payed over £220 upgrading my puter just so I can do online gaming.
Am I missing anything here? Is there something I can do to boost my system performance or perhaps something is getting in the way?
Any help is most appreciated!

££ sign, means u r in my location .

ok, noe to tell you, which connection you are using? for on-line gaming, i'll recommend Nildram (though am not a gamer), but my class fellow use to play on-line games (dont remember their names), but this service is truly made for gamers.

as once a person came to me (his mom bought him a ATi 9800XT 256MB) rom me, and for that he has to upgrade his full system. still he mailed me that he is lagging in frame rates. I recommended him Nildram (my friend was using 2MB i think), but you can as well go for 512K on good speed DSL providers, like i'm on Plus (cool), I had used Zen,
(cool). also your hardware is as well dependent, you cannot squeeze out the juice from a cheap modem,get some good one (if you are on thrid brand name)

for confirmation of your hardware (that it hasnt got a fault), try soem of ur friends, with different DSL connections, or as well invitre them to your home with their systems to work on ur DSL. it at lesat wil clear u out, whats happening.

My current set-up should be able to handle JO perfectly well considering that the min sys reqs are: 256MB RAM, 1.5GHz CPU. My graphics card is more than capable!

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Not at all. Consider for instance, the reqs. for Far Cry:
Processor: AMD Athlon™ 1 GHz or Pentium® III 1 GHz
RAM: 256 MB Video Card: 64 MB
DirectX® 9.0b-compatible graphics card

Now there isnt a chance in hell the game is playable at anything higher than 800x600@low-detail there. I had a quick look at Joint Operations and I'll tell ya, you're specs arent enough to push the game past (i'm esitmating here) 1024x768@medium-high (but mostly medium -- especially so for online)

Something that I do suffer from is sudden ping spikes. I know so because I have spent alot of time playing Black Hawk Down which has a ping-o-meter in the corner. My ping would be trundling along at about 20-40 and then it would suddenly spike upto 300+ which often got me booted from the servers. My connection is with wanadoo, AKA freeserve, which is pretty mainstream. The modem is an external speedtouch 550.
Praetor: Actually I can't push the game past low-medium for the large, 100 player servers even with a ping of 10. The good news is I have a bit more cash stashed away for an upgrade so what do you think I should do? I can afford about £80 which will buy me another stick of RAM and leave me with £30 change. That would then take my RAM to 1024MB DDR PC2700. I could upgrade the mobo I guess which would allow me to increase the bus capacity for both my RAM and CPU.

Not much you can really do with $150USD ... personally I'd upgrade to a better motherboard, say the A7N8X series from ASUS and get yourself a solid CPU fan. With that done, you can OC that CPU ... now if you had say $200USD I'd reccomend the mobo upgrade, double the RAM and not OC (unless you've already got cooling)

freeserve isnt bad, though I am really depressed with their Dial-Up, anyway, is the gameserver operated on their server? or somewhere else? first try the option of getting mates to your home and try on their PC, and taking ur system to their and try again on their connection (different modem/connections).

or if you are in London, you can come to my place for test-up, i'm with plus.net and U.S Robotics Wireless Router (of course it has wires as well).

I'm near Bath, a few hours away from London and I don't get my driving license back (Don't ask) until November. The only other person I know that lives near to me that's got a PC and is into gaming is my girlfriends young son and he doesn't play JO. They only have dial-up as well. Maybe in Novemember though. Somthing I've wanted to do for ages is to get several people together and link-up our PCs and then go online to play JO or Black Hawk Down or something.

You can quickly determine if its the ISP thats bottlenecking you by hosting a LAN game (with just you, and if possible, some bots) ... if that runs laggy then its your computer

Well it runs very smoothly when hosting a LAN game. The problem seems to get worse on the larger servers. A 32 player server will give me no problems whereas a 100 player server is very laggy. I have always assumed that this must be due to the fact that the proccessor and RAM have more to deal with because there are more players to track the movements of. Before choosing a server to play on I always check the ping. The one I usually choose is a 100 player server with a ping of 10. It always pings 10. I once saw it ping 40 though. Are you absolutly sure that it must be the fault of my ISP? Because I have just noticed that when I set the graphics options to 'bilinear filtering' instead of 'trilinear filtering' it actually runs quite nicely. This can only make me conclude that it's a problem with my puter and not my connection.
What does bottlenecking mean in relation to my ISP?

What does bottlenecking mean in relation to my ISP?

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It means you've got a corny ISP

But what does it actually mean?

It means you have a slow connection.