Ian I agree with Mac, your machine is not that bad just slow when it's running right. My old machine sounds similar with yours, a P4 1 ghz and 2 gigs of ram running XP. I got rid of it about 18 months ago so I was running Biab 2011.5 and it would generate a 5 RT song in about 30-45 seconds. My new one does it in less than 10 seconds.

A newer machine running Win 7 is much better on many levels. I continually had problems with ASIO but now it's perfect. And the thing is I didn't do anything it's just with the new machine I installed it, it worked and that was it. No tweaking, no problems while with XP it was a complete chore and it never did work right. I have no idea if the problem was the hardware, the OS, me, the stars or what. All I know is the brand new box fixed it.

I do know the Win 7 64 bit ASIO drivers for my EMU and Sonic Cell are only a few years old while the XP ones are 6-7 years old and like anything else, newer is better.

The other thing with XP is nobody is writing bug fixes or updates for XP drivers for anything any more. Win 7 has been out for 3 years or so and now Win 8 is out and there's a few on this forum running it and reporting it's even better than Win 7. Companies don't have the resources to fix old stuff for XP so it's on you to figure it out.

Bob