Ok fair point. I was thinking along the lines that most manufactureded pc's tend to double the amount of ram ie 64->128->256->512mb every generation. So if she had less than 256, she would most likely have 128mb. I have used XP on a machine with 128mb of ram and while a fresh install is fine, once a few things have been installed it really starts to crawl.

There are a few other things that could be causing this however. But without knowing more about the problem it is very hard to diagnose the problem. When is it slow?

Starting up, upto the point where you login?

Loading up your desktop?

Opening programs?

Does the light(Hard Disk)of the front of your pc flash a lot while it is being slow?

Try that holding shift thing I talked about, if it works then it should be fairly simple to find out whats going wrong.