I've gone gaming mad after years away, and lusting after the PS3 I will never afford. When I realised there's so many great games for PC I loaded Windows XP on and have recently gone nuts for it, especially Left 4 Dead.

I'm a little annoyed I can't upgrade things like my video card, though I suspect there might be ways to overclock my system. Has anyone got ways of getting the system running even better? I am happy with how it runs right now, but better is better.

This is the system:

iMac 24" 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM, ATI Radeon HD2600, Windows XP SP3

Example game settings:

Left 4 Dead - Everything set to high except the anti-aliasing, I think another filterey thing, and the resolution at 800x600 (which looks good texture wise but for 24" screen it could be better)

Maybe just cutting down XP resources somehow?

You've got a very good system there, but the graphics card is 2 to 4 years out of date and only midrange from there. You'll struggle playing anything at more than medium settings, I think. Cutting down XP won't really help, your graphics (unaffected by XP) are heavily outclassed by your processor and RAM (therefore making the graphics your bottleneck). I really wouldn't recommend overclocking an iMac either, they're not really designed to handle the extra heat.

I'm afraid I'm not aware of anyone here gaming on a Mac, or indeed anyone who uses one (I know a couple whose family have various Macs).

I suspected so. At least the next macs will have quality graphics cards cos of the new snow leopard thing, doubt I'll get one for a couple of years. Hackintosh maybe...?