I have a win98 machine, with 192mb RAM, and 700mghz PIII, it is a dell laptop. One of the best uses it serves other than school work is as an MP3 jukebox for parties. When I am playing MP3's from a playlist, downloading from napster (not anymore unfortunately), and ripping a cd to mp3 files on my harddrive with MusicMatch (all this at once mind you) The system freezes. Is this because of a limt in my ram and would going to 512mb (or 488 if I just added a 256 chip) help? Or is it possible that with MP3's being read from the HDD, Napster downloading and writing to it, and MusicMatch writing to the HDD also, that the hard drive itself cannot read/write fast enough to keep up with the information flow? Its's a dell inspiron 3800 and the hard drive is an 18GB IBM. I have no idea what model HDD it is or what it's read write speed is. I only know it's IBM becuase i saw the tech take my macine apart to replace my cooling fan. Granted it mightbe not fair to ask a laptop to do all this at one, but sometimes I need to and after spending that much on a computer it should do what I want. Thanks for the Support Dan

This is due to low system resources, not RAM. Regardless of how much ram you have, all these activities at once will lower system resources to the point where the computer will fail to respond. Any time you are downloading from internet, it takes most resources. Check your resources during these activities by right clicking "My Computer", select properties, performance. Any time system resources is below 50% you will start to have problems. Al