>The cheapest computer you could possibly buy these days has a CPU that is plenty fast enough for Web browsing and general business use.

Depends - see my other post...

>RAM is important - you need to have enough that your system basically never uses virtual RAM (i.e. pages to disk). If you have more than an "enough" amount, Windows will use it for a disk cache which will greatly improve I/O performance.

Basically correct for usual machines, but not for RAM - heavy machines. The OS disc cache on Win32 has a fixed upper limit of 1 GB AFAIR and there are some settings in the registry tweaking its behaviour depending on usage, mem size and so on.

>This is important with laptop computers, which tend to have slow hard drives. Therefore it's more important to have lots of RAM in laptops than in desktops which typically have somewhat faster hard drives.

Very true. One point often overlooked is that the speed of the HD is different depending on the nearness of the physical sector to the outer rim because of radial speed. Therefore it makes sense to partition the disk, use the inner sectors for mostly static, read once data and have a fast "working" partition on the outer rim. Just look at the tyoical disk tests on tomshardware or similar sites.
>
>For XP, 512MB RAM minimum for good performance. Vista - take MS's minimum requirements, and double it.
And make it a habit to check the running services once a month disabling a few automatically started. Who needs pets if we have to care for our friendly silicone helpers<bg>.

regards

thomas