More "real" ram is the first thing to get, VM will slow everything down. Ram is cheap & easy to insatll (I have 512meg in my Pismo). You could try & make a minimal sys extension set also although I havn't tried that yet. P.S., I have a beige g3/233 also & it still comes in handy. Have it hooked to the Powerbook with a crossover ethernet cable for file shareing.