running emulators

im having problems running emulators properly ive tried different versions and plugins but they always run choppy or crash. ive tried all the sega saturn emulators and most psx. however snes, megadrive, amiga, gameboy and n64 all run fine.im thinking this has to be my computer?
its pentium 4 3ghz
2mb ram
windows xp prodo i need something more powerful or am i just doing something wrong?

Check this site for latest emulators and advicehttp://forums.ngemu.com/http://forums.ngemu.com/saturn-emulation/128989-saturn-emulator-best.html

I think you mean 2GB ram, and what graphics chip do you have?

oops yeah 2gb ram :-[
not great with computers obviously
ATI FireGL V3100 PCIe16 128Mb is only thing i can find in spec that mentions graphics

Replying to #4

I downt know it depence also on the emulator its self, they also do help with hardware...

the firegl card is not intended for games, while I have a friend who managed quite well with one, I have one that is absolute shit (V3350 256MB). This could be contributing to the issues, as could the video ram being slightly on the low side. Additionally the V3100 is an entry level firegl. PSX emulators generally need careful configuration to work properly (and one config does not necessarily work for all games), and sega saturn emulators are fairly poor to start with.

i upgraded to an nvidea geforce 8600gt 256mb and 4gb ram and it works better now.
1 thought though, could it have been because i have the images stored on an external usb drive? might it run better from internal hard drive?

Other than a slight hiccup once in a while, there's little difference between internal and usb hard drives. The emus I use are ePSXe 1.6 (PS) and SSF (SATURN) but like loonylion says you have to configure the graphics settings for optimum performance.