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>The cheapest computer you could possibly buy these days has a CPU that is plenty fast enough for Web browsing and general business use. At the moment, hardware speed is ahead of software bloat (although it looks like Vista may change that).
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>The only people who need really fast CPUs are gamers, people doing heavy graphic arts/digital video processing and those putting together servers that will be heavily loaded.
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>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. 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.
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>For XP, 512MB RAM minimum for good performance. Vista - take MS's minimum requirements, and double it.
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>Be aware that some utilities like antivirus can be real hogs. A client of mine installed NAV 2006 on a W2K Pro box this afternoon:
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>- With no AV loaded: RAM usage 90MB
>- With NAV 2006 loaded: RAM usage 168MB
>- IOW, 78MB (almost as much as W2K) just for the *@//*@// AV !!
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>He's complaining that his 128MB RAM system is now very sluggish. I guess Symantec didn't tell him he needs an extra 128MB+ RAM just to load their product :(

Thank you very much, Al. The information is very helpful.