OK... more questions!
I was asking on behalf of a friend who has just got himself a new PC; it came with integrated graphics, and after some investigation it turns out that it's one of these crippled motherboards with no AGP slot. So much for that as a games machine...
Anyway, he's got another slightly older machine, an IBM NetVista 6350 (searching on the website shows that it's a P4-1.6GHz, Intel 845 chipset, upgraded to 1152Mb SDRAM and a nVidia GeForce 2 MX440 in a 32-bit AGP 4X (1.5v) slot). Does a brand new graphics card makes sense on a two-year-old PC? It is currently his main PC, and is OK but not great with modern games.
Thanks again. I've never been a hardware person, and I'm always about a year behind on these things