I think people have reported this before but I would like to address it as well.
Firstly, the game frequently freezes for several seconds while in Haven especially near the Auction House. I've set all configurations to low but it barely changed anything. In the Clockworks, lag occurs often in levels with weather effects. It always lags for a few seconds when monsters spawn in new areas and when I change weapons. While this is most of the times manageable I despise when your character blocks in an endless lag loop of the last action executed for many minutes causing death if monsters are nearby. It also disconnects me from the server and there are high chances for me to return to Haven when I log back on.
Secondly, while I was soloing the last level of Tier 2 of the Silver Bishop elevator the play screen suddenly went blank but the monster kept attacking. Again I died quickly and the screen remained blank until I've returned to Haven.
Lastly, I would also like to mention that I did not have such severe problems before the latest patches and I play the game using my Steam account.

Here are my computer specs if it helps with anything:

Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2800+
Speed: 2079 Mhz
Memory: 1023 Mb DDR1
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon X1650 Series
Operating System: Windows XP SP3 32 bit
Java Version: 1.6.0_29

What I want to know is if this is a problem from the game itself or my PC and if there's a way to at least reduce the lag.

Thank you for reading and have a good day.