My computer that I now own is a Sony Vaio Pentium 4, 1.6ghz with 564mb of ram. I'm wondering if I should upgrade the ram to 1 gig or just get a new machine. My wife does not want to spend more than $500 on a new cpu. Would the upgrade be better or just get a new computer? The problem we are having with our current computer is that it needs to be reformatted every 6 months to run right. I get really tired of having to reinstall everything and then getting 2 hours worth of windows xp updates, antivirus, and all that jazz updated. Any advice? I've already been advised not to get Vista because it's such a resource hog.