Finally broke down and used my last paycheck to order parts for a new PC. One can only deal with playing 2-3 year old games at low framerates on mediocre settings for so long. I've been out of the loop too long so who knows how poorly I chose, but I ended up ordering dual gtx560s, i5-2500k, 8gb ram, 115gb ssd, 2tb hdd, etc, plus the various other sundries to make it all work.