Hmm, in a way you're both right Matt and Sam.

Gotta have the right RAM, but adding RAM for speed is reasonable provided dalemccl is underequipped in that department. However, as Matt said, the M/B must support RAM beyond what is already installed.

dalemcci almost certainly has a 32 bit version of XP - this limits him to 4GB addressable, of which up to almost a Gig will be inaccessable as that much of the address space will be used by things like the video card and other hardware devices, including the BIOS.

For 32 bit XP, 1 GB seems to be a "sweet spot". Adding RAM above this number will still improve things but the returns are diminishing. I.E. going from 1GB to 2GB won't give half the performance improvement that going from 1/2 a GB to 1 GB does*. That said, these days I won't sell a PC with less than 2 GB and preferably 4GB. With 4 GB you get the full amount of addressable space in the machine even if almost a Gig is wasted. RAM is cheap at the moment.

If the M/B can use faster RAM than is installed then it helps to change RAM type. If the M/B supports bank switching then matched RAM modules will improve things. BUT, I suspect a faster HDD will probably be more effective assuming the existing drive is 4200 or 5400 RPM - going to 7200, 10000 or even 15000 (Good SCSI) RPM will help a lot, as will fast interfaces (which spec. of IDE, SCSI, SATA or SAS**) given that I/O to the drive will likely be a significant factor in decompressing the wma's.

* A caveat here is that some applications like Adobe CS3 suite have a huge RAM requirement and will use everything it can grab so for app's like this you can't add too much RAM (within the addressing limits of the M/B and OS).

** being a P4 it's a good bet that it's IDE, but SATA was just starting to make a reasonable foothold in the 3.2 GHz era so it couuld be that but if so it would be the lower spec. (1.5 Gbit/S) so a PATA 133 IDE would likely have been slightly faster.

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