On Monday, March 31, 2014 9:59:19 AM UTC-4, Mayayana wrote:
| The new or off-lease computer would come with the OS installed, and

| installing virtual XP is litterally a "piece of cake".



You mean Virtual XP mode for Win7? I thought you

meant installing a VM. I don't know anything about

Virtual XP mode, but it seems to require Win7 Pro,

which costs quite a bit more than Win7 Home OEM.

Maybe that's worth it to someone who can't give up

XP but *has to* buy a new machine.



| I've been in the PC business now for 25 years (well, will be 25

| years in August). 256 is inadequate to run anything of consequence on

| XP. 512 will work, but 1024 really wakes it up, particularly if

| running 2 programs at a time. Takes all the load off the hard drive

| (swap file/virtual ram issues). With 256 ram, you WILL wear out the

| hard drive.

|



How is it that so many people in a home repair group

suddenly turn out to build computers for a living?



I wouldn't prefer to install 256 MB RAM, of course, and

there is an issue these days with bloated software, but

256 MB RAM can work OK on a clean machine where people

are doing typical things like Web browsing, email Office

docs, etc.

Good grief. A MB today wouldn't even support installing
the density chips you'd need to make 256MB.




If you're worried about wearing out your hard

disk then turn off the useless indexing service and either

avoid AV or at least don't leave it at default settings,

scanning everything you touch. There are lots of software

causes of running the disk unnecessarily that have nothing

to do with using the swap file.

Or just buy a basic new PC, which sounds like the solution
to the OP's problem, which is a 12 year old PC with a failing disk
and where he wants more performance. Why does it have to get
so complicated?