Here's the deal.  Daughter's computer got hit by lightning.  I told them I'd sell them mine at half what I gave for it and buy a new one (I know, I'm a generous OF).  I went to various online and brick and mortar stores and stumbled across a deal at Circuit City.  After finally finding a salesman who would talk to me I bought an Acer AMD 3300 with 512 mb of Ram, 160 gig HD, DVD-dual drive, 17" monitor, and Canon printer for a grand total with taxes of $688.  After playing all the rebate games the net cost of the computer and monitor is about $250.  I looked my computer over (Cisnet 2.8 Celeron with 1 mb RAM, 80 Gig HD, DVD drive and 19" monitor and decided to let them have the new one at the price I quoted them.

Well we set it up here so all the updates and such could be downloaded via my fast connection rather than their dialup.  In the process of playing with it I find it is bunches faster than my 2.8.

So where do I start looking?  This has Norton vs my PC-cillin, and I have Spy Sweeper running in the background.  My processor is not THAT much slower and I have twice the RAM.