My Windows 10 boot is 1.2 Gig. My Win 7 boot is 0.8 Gig.
Tried stopping unnecessary stuff loading? Should be able to get any boot down to 1.5 Gig. Also, you could use features such as Readyboost and have a 16GB SSD sitting there as a cache between the RAM and the HDD.
Or set swapfile to a minimum of 4/8GB, and no maximum, which should reduce HDD swap resizing.
As to the RAM, it's just old, so pricey. There's always Ebay, and take a chance.
Edit: Read further down, and there's a chance of 32-bit. Not sure how that affects Readyboost, but my guess would be the old 3.xx GB limit (I forget what it is).
Suggest you do what you can of this list, within the 32-bit context -
https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/windows/t/4227430-...
Edited by camieabz (Tue 03-Nov-20 18:36:38)