About that 4gb recommendation I made above.

I'm running WinXP 32 bit, and was aware that a 32 bit os can only see 3gb (only is a relative term! I remember when...). When I built my system, I had planned on putting in 2gb. After I bought the memory and installed it, I read about a feature on my motherboard where it is able to "stripe" the memory across two separate modules for faster access. I decided to buy the second 2gb module and enable this feature. At $50 for 2gb (made no sense to only buy 1gb) of Kingston memory, I couldn't see why I wouldn't max out Windows, and enable this memory striping feature. WinXP says it sees 3.24gb RAM, and a memory speed test I did showed roughly 10% faster memory just by adding the second module. The other reason I decided to do this now is that this motherboard is known to be fussy about the RAM it uses. It seemed easier to max it out right now while the memory it is compatible with is easily available.

I have no idea if any of this makes a difference in real life. We run two separate user profiles at the same time, and I do some photo editing. Problems I had with disk thrashing on my old system (512mb) are now gone. The hard drive seems to be accessed far less than before.