I agree with Camerongray. A ram upgrade would benefit you greatly. I once ran windows 7 on a Old P4 laptop i had it had just under a gig of ram i think 768Mb or something of the sort. Basically had issues running flash video, any games at all. open the case find the model of the motherboard and google it, to find what ram it accepts and whats the MAx ram you can install. Remember that 4gb is max for any 32bit machine, however if 256mb is in there i doubt you will reach 4gb but you never know! Good luck. However after a memory upgrade if you can just to be safe a fresh install of 7 or even XP would really benefit you. Fresh start with fresh drivers and a clean registry is always worth the time put in. best of Luck.