How do I stop making team fortress slightly laggy?

Is my specs.

The lag is not THAT bad, but during games the lag get's interupting during firefights.
What ping do I need to play at in order to have a smooth game?

Is there any no cost (No purchasing) ways of increasing play enjoyment?

Sorry this is not typed correctly, it is 7 in the morning and I am tired.

Look on the internet to make sure you have the latest drivers installed for your graphics card. Make sure you have nothing running in the background while you play. There really isn't any major hardware problem with your system, it's probably just server latency when a whole bunch of calculations have to be made at once, i.e. during a fight where gibs and shots are flying around, and everyone is shooting at once. That's just normal.

The only method of fixing that is to buy a house right next to your local broadband/telephone exchange, but that's hardly a cost-effective solution/

What do you mean by lag...

As in internet lag? or framerate problems. If its the second then its probably the graphics card. That site is not that helpful, and shouldn't be relied upon fully.

Your graphics card is not very good.. Upgrade to a more modern card and you should have no problem, since the rest of your system seems much more up to date.

I play on a laptop that easily fulfils the "recommended settings", but still I also had the same problem as you.
I now play on the lowest resolution possible (720x640 or somthing like that) and all graphics on the lowest possible settings.

I also use the console commands
cl_ejectbrass 0  (turn off some effects with shells)
r_dynamic 0  (turns of dynamical shadows)
mat_dxlevel 81 (use DirectX 8.1. This speeds things up very much, but of course everything will be more ugly..)

 

 

You need more ram too! 512 really just doesnt cut it anymore, especially with vista

Im not sure how you got a new triple core processor with Vista and so little ram.

Happened to my friend,  they sold him a machine with VISTA on 512MB of ram!?!?
A laughable thought, even for the home edition. And he wondered why the PC they sold him ended up being so slow.
So i bought him a 1gb stick for $15 and the speed of his machine was greatly improved. It went from it taking like 30-45s for internet explorer to launch, to like 3-5s.

But he has 2.9 Gb of ram according to the pictures ?
It just says 512 Mb is the minimum.

rofl, misread. thanks for straightening me out

You could definately use a new graphics card... I'd grab a 9600GT ($170 512MB) or 8800GT ($100 256MB, $180 512MB). A 256MB 8800GT is a steal for $100 - HIGHLY recommended.

But in the meantime, turn down all the settings as low as possible and try adding -dxlevel 81 to command line options.

You have a great system, but the 128 on your video card is the thing that's totally failing your computer. 
A 512 or even 256 will make your system near flawless.
Definitely grab a 512vRAM ASAP to enjoy everything TF2 has to offer.

RAM means nothing in video cards. 128mb is fine for 1024x768. You only need memory beyond 1280x1024, where even 256 is sufficient. What matters is Stream Processors (DX10) or Pixel Pipelines (DX9). http://www.teamfortress2fort.com/forums/t/Regardingvideocards-10398.aspx#90418