Hi Undies~

I still encounter many machines (at the cheaper end of the market) of 3-4 yrs of age.. sold with only 256Mb.. boost these to 1024Mb and it is a big difference - Certainly bigger if the bloated performance killer is not there.. but brings the machine to very usable.
I find most machines of Intel 1.7Ghz (intel) or 2.5Ghz (AMD) class and above the memory upgrade shows improvement.. below that the cpu hit reduces the effectiveness..
I take your point, but I was (subconsciously) referring to the home, SOHO, SBE sectors. I recall doing a bit of research back in late 2002, given all the stick that XP was getting. I found from a review of 5 UK computer buyer type magazines that only two (new) products were being offered with 512Mb........... the rest were all 1Gb.

Personally, I haven't built with less than 1Gb since 2001. Before that it was 512Mb, which made sense for 9x/ME boxes. Windows 2000 was the oddball, because it was quite happy with 512Mb or far less if on a corporate network (thinner client).

I do come across stuff with 256Mb, but these are all Dell, IBM or HP manufactured and are obviously ex-corporate boxes. Mostly PIIIs with a few P4s thrown in. My guess is that they used to boot NT4.0 SP6a or Windows 2000. I do upgrade those to 1024Mb, or whatever.

I am not sure about processors, as I have never tried XP or Vista on a PIII, but I can assure you that XP runs just fine on an Athlon 1900+ (1.6Ghz) and 2200+ (1.9Ghz?), and that Vista runs fine on the 2400+ (2.01Ghz) and 3000+ (2.1Ghz).

I am not sure that processor speed is the issue though. Looking at the process monitor I see 100% peaks when the machines noticeably lag, followed by periods of "normal" activity. The peaks match the security suite activity, so I would suspect that it is the security software not letting other applications have a share of the action?

Another aspect might be process conflicts? I noticed that when installing the commercial version of ZoneAlarm; a machine slowed down to a snail's pace and took about 10 minutes to boot. Now, there were two other AV products running on this box, and I had disabled them in the startup....... or so I thought. The trouble seems to be that these things try to protect themselves against malware shutting them down, and launch processes before the main application? Once I uninstalled them completely, everything returned to normal.

So, if for some reason you have installed another security product, make sure that you get rid of it or your original one, completely. Remember you may have to go to their website to get a special tool to do this