Ok I tried recording some game play in World of Warcraft to make a movie. The preview and playbacks are slow and choppy. I've tried different codecs, changed video quality, reduced and increased Key Frame Rate and reduced and increased Frame Rate.

Could it be that I'm using the shareware version?

Here are my specs:

AMD Athlon 3200+
1024MB Corsair Extreme DDR RAM 84pinn (I think)
ATI Radeon 9200SE 128MB Graphics Card

Could it be the video card? If I were to upgrade to an ATI Radeon X850XT, I know it would be capable of handling anything.