An opinion Kendall...

As far as I can work out from what you have said and memories of the troubles you had, I think your problems are software related and that the computer itself is fine but that is just a guess - I haven't seen the machine.

The PC would be considered out of date but a lot depends on what you use it for or want to do with it. To offer some perspective:

My mother runs a Packard Bell with a Pentium 200 processor, 32MB RAM and a 3.2GB hard disk. It runs on Windows 95 and does everything she needs - wordprocessing (word 97), email, Internet and a few other bits and pieces. I find it slow loading software and very slow on certain things like playing with graphics on Photoshop but it still can cope with 95% of what I do and when my (Athlone 1Ghz) went down, I used it for Paltalk, etc. with no problems...

I think the bottom line is assessing your own needs. Some people do need all the power they can get and the latest software but I think it is all to easy to jump on the bandwaggon of getting the latest version of Windows, Word, etc which will require more horsepower without considering whether you really need the extras...

Jon