FRAPS is a resource hog, especially on older systems. If your running a Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz and tried to use FRAPS, I am surprised you didnt have 90% lag. I own a copy of FRAPS and I would suggest that a true Dual Core System with at least 2 gigs of Ram be used and not a single core with virtual second core that the 3.2ghz probably as if its the P4 3.2Ghz HT (Hyperthreading).
Heavier games may need more cores to keep up. I'm able to use FRAPS to record Fallout 3 gameplay at 1440x900 with absolutely no slowdown at all (surprisingly). Of course at that resolution, the files grow rather quickly.
FRAPS is mean on hard drives, the HD led will be pegged solid when capturing,
A lot of contiguous free space helps; this is one of the few scenarios that I personally would ever consider forcing defragmentation with the utility.
which could be abusive to IDE drives while SATA drives would handle it better.
ATA-7(133 mbps) hasn't yet been saturated by consumer level hard drives... Either way, he hardware is the same with either drive so wether the drive's logic board happens to be IDE or SATA doesn't really matter. Usually the throughput of a drive is well below the 133mbps saturation for ATA-7; the possible burst rate might exceed it but at the same time Bursts are short, usually a few seconds; recording a video via FRAPS usually pegs I/O DPCs for quite a while.
On that note, it's faster to write the data uncompressed then to try to save space "on the fly" by compressing it, unless you use a very simple codec, or if you have lots of spare cores lying around; otherwise it just means even more work and will usually even in the best of cases result in dropped frames.
Another possibility, depending on exactly what the game is and what you need the video for, is that many games allow for "demo" recording. You could record the gameplay in this manner and then play it back with an appropriate capture setup at a later time; some games even have built in AVI recording for Demo playback, which results in completely smooth video (since the program can takes it's time on each frame without skipping/dropping any)
