"HEMI-Powered" wrote in message
...

My old PC, now my wife's PC that replaced her old and slow Win
98SE system last year, is an AMD 1.6 GHz CPU machine with just
512 MB. It runs S-L-O-W! Part of it is memory and the rest is a
small and SLOW HD. I could fix this, maybe, by upping the ram
another half meg and replace the HD, but my strategy is to give
her my PC when I build a new one, maybe this winter. See my other
post for details on that. But, given my experience in a graphics
environment with this old workhorse and my wife's limited surfing
experience, and I would say that the paint on growing grass would
still be wet when I cut the grass if she were runing Vista.

How big is the HD? IDE? 5400 or 7200?
Hard drive size, especially available hard drive size, has an impact on
speed. If Windows runs out of RAM, it uses hard drive for RAM with a swap
file, which could be why my system runs pretty smooth. I'm running a 1 GHz
AMD with 512 RAM with 2 HDs, a 120 GB and a 40 GB. I'm currently running
WinME on that, and it should work even better with XP. I wouldn't try Vista
on it...