[Wine] New to wine -- some problems.

[Nafets]

I installed Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit around a month ago. About a week ago I downloaded wine, through Ubuntu Software Center, and I've been having some problems in  getting games to work fully, many of which  are said to work without many bugs at all, or at least not as much as I've been experiencing. 

Two games that I've tried were Half-Life(through steam), and recently Perfect World. Half-Life works at an excellent speed as was expected considering its age, but there isn't sound. I've tried switching Audio driver settings, but it didn't work at all. Perfect World, works, but very crudely. I followed this video guide here, but I'm having problems that aren't the product in the video guide.

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=9923.

Anyway, my problems are that the game has no sound, it runs very slow. The mouse pointer only shows sometimes, the characters textures show up randomly, and it crashes every other startup or in the middle of trying to play. 

I followed all of the steps in the video, and I have up to date drivers. 

My PC's specs:

Nvidia 9500gt
Pentium Dual Core E2140 1.6ghz
4x512mb DDR2 sdram 667mhz

I'm wondering, could it be that my version of Wine is outdated? How do I determine if that is the case, and how do I update without losing my files?