One thing to be aware of is my experience with DELL machines is that they put a little extra notch on their own memory that doesn't exist on most generic brands, thus forcing you to buy their memory. Not sure if this applies to your computer or not, but the safest bet would be to actually remove a DIMM from your computer, bring it to Staples or wherever, and compare the notches to the memory you're considering. Hopefully you can get generic as just last week I upgraded two of my computers from 256MB to 768MB each for only $120 TOTAL.
If you have a broad-band connection and are using IE, you should go into tools..internet options. Click the settings button and set your "amount of disk space to use" as low as it will go (usually 1MB). File caching was designed for dial up connections and is unnecessary for fast connections as you can retrieve the files again as you need them pretty much invisibly.
Kingston and Crucial are amonst the most reliable RAM. It's better to have 1 bank of 512 Meg than 2 banks of 256Meg, Windows will have less problem trying to synchronize two banks. Cheers !!
G. Unless things have changed, RDRAM must be used in sets of two banks. In other words if you are at 512mb with 2X256, you cannot double your memory by installing a single 512 with your current 2X256. Also, if your Dell, like mine, has 4 memory slots, you should make sure you do not have 4X128 currently installed, which will impact your decision on how to upgrade. Unfortunately, I don't believe RDRAM is available from Crucial. O
The music will do it to you. Chat programs are very light so you don't have to worry there. Downloading pictures and the artwork programs themselves are both pretty memory intensive.
Certainly not the fastest, but probably fast enough for most people and - what is more important to me - it runs very, very stable in combination with an Intel chipset. There are people here on this board who could need a P5 for their setup (especially those 'traders' who run multimedia programs and stuff like that on it), but for me a P3 933Mhz in my tradestation (yes, a computer dedicated to trading) is adequate. Never upgrade if you don't have to...
Nitro, I use EchoTrader2. I'm not having a problem yet, just looking for a way to check resources. Trying Gnome's suggestion right now. G.