A friend of mine just bought an eMachine. Kind of tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn't listen. Anyways, it has an Athelon 64 3800 processor, with 1 gig of memory, and Vista Home installed on it. I went over to his house to help him set it up, and we both noticed right away how slow it is. I don't think it is Vista ( not sure though ), cause when we try to run a program, there seems to be a hesitation of about 10 seconds, and then the program does what it is supposed to do. This is also with copying files, moving stuff, etc etc. I have removed McAffee from it, and put AVG on the machine. I have also turned off some features in Vista, but the slowness is still there. In talking with emachines tech support, they told me that the onboard video card uses part of the 1 gig memory. And that because of that, Vista will run slower, unless he puts more memory in the machine. Well, the motherboard has two slots for memory, and ofcourse both slots have 512 megs of memory. So for him to put more memory in the machine, he basicly has to throw those two sticks away, and go out and buy 2 one gig sticks ( he is retired, and the money is not there for that ). That was the reason he ended up with this machine in the first place. Now for my question..... Since he uses the machine basicly for email and persuing the internet, might he be better off, running XP on that machine? If that is the case.... would it be best to repartition the hard drive into one drive, and then format it, and then put XP on it, or...... make it a duel boot system with Vista and XP. I'm pretty sure i can probably repartition the drive, and format it for him, to install XP. But i have never attempted to install two operating systems on one drive. What are his options?

return the computer. although not hi-end there's no reason why it should be that slow. and why the hassle with dual boot? email/web surfing can be done with XP for quite some time in the foreseeable future.

Thanks for the reply, The_Oracle Will i need to get drivers for the audio and video for that motherboard?

most certainly! before you format the drive, download and run SIW. save your hardware info to file (html) or print for further use.