Yes, the speed of hard disk would play a role in the speed of performance. Faster the disk, less time to access the swap file. Fragmentation will play a certain role, too. Whoa, Fran, I don't know how much your husband paid, but it wasn't peanuts. That's one mean machine - in CPU, in graphics and especially in RAM. Can you send it to me if you don't want it? :-) I played with a very similar laptop quite recently, immediately after I got 5.5 and the speed was normal. It had a weaker graphics card, Go 6600, with 128 MB video RAM and when I used a proper mouse instead of the damn touchpad, it all went perfectly normally. (To see the amount of video RAM: right-click on the desktop -> Settings -> Advanced -> Adapter). What you could do is to go to System Properties and then to Advanced and click on Settings under Performance, and then again on Advanced. Put the mark beside Programs in the upper two cattegories, and in Virtual Memory check Let Windows manage... or System managed size, whatever the case might be. BTW, you won't be able to use it on batteries much, cause it probably drains them quite quickly. The one I mention above emptied its batteries in about an hour and a half.

-- erlik