Just to prove I can 'take a break from serious simming'...

I picked up this one with USAF and am hoping to get beyond the intro.

1. I get /very/ choppy sound in the first movie and text scroll.

2. I get a 'black box' mouse scroll or occasionally a ghosted flight glove but no real cursor in the flight screens.

3. Hyperspace. I can't get there. Emkay and Aeron are talking about something they shouldn't be on an open channel, I dock with the cargo pod and /try/ to follow her through the beacon but upon getting to the jump point, first her machine shows a blue engine flash and the game locks so hard I have to coldstart a reboot.

The 'analyze your system' or whatever it's called seems to think my machine is up to snuff (runs all the graphics tests and fails but one of the sound ones) but here's the spec anyways:

HP 8560C Pavillion
96MB RAM
Savage 4 32megs (overriding the onboard AGP)
Riptide Sound card
8 Gigs of harddrive and a full-install.

P.S. can I also up the graphics a bit? The ships seem all blurry and lo-rez compared to my old Tie Fighter game. Maybe there's a 1024X768 setting? Patches?