Ready boost etc on Windows XP - RAM

[dabster]

Having an old desktop rig which is an AMD Sempron 64 bit 2500, Gigabyte k8m800 motherboard + on board S3 graphics 64 MB shared + 512 MB RAM. As it might surprise this is still a good rig and works up fine, for all the minimalistic tasks I am not seeing any CPU spikes - All quick enough.

But the problem is when multiple applications are open at one go. Chromium, adobe and word 2003 makes it slow when tried to move from 1 app to another - guessing it is to do with RAM, specially with chromium.
Solutions that I am thinking:
1. create a page file on a pen drive though I am not sure how successful that can be on windows XP, plus Pen drives I have handy aren't high speed corsair ones, just normal kingston. and readyboost isn't supported on XP(and i haven't tried it on windows 7 anytime)

2. just look for version of application which are lighter and don't make computer slow.
(sincerely I believe that is one thing that makes things slower - newer bloated with features applications when half of the time those new features don't add much value. No bashing up, but i am not certain what google is doing by innovating chromium in short term, newer version for security fixes is fine thou.)

coming back to the point - let me know options with this old rig so that this rig can be faster - except for buying a new one.(won't - this is a spare rig)

 

[whitestar_999]

don't use chromium/chrome.it was never meant to run on such low ram system.try firefox or opera & don't use more than 4 tabs at a time.also by adobe if you mean acrobat reader then ditch it immediately & start using sumatra pdf.instead of word 2003 try this(my own upload):
Download kingsoft office giveaway exe

 

[dabster]

don't use chromium/chrome.it was never meant to run on such low ram system.try firefox or opera & don't use more than 4 tabs at a time.also by adobe if you mean acrobat reader then ditch it immediately & start using sumatra pdf.instead of word 2003 try this(my own upload):
Download kingsoft office giveaway exe

Re-looked everything. seemingly only chromium is causing memory hiccups. rest pdf reader word 2003 just work fine. will try to find a working smaller version of chrome.

what about the pagefile on usb thing, will that do any better.
(my trials quickly don't yield any perf changes on this rig)

 

[thetechfreak]

For browser my recommendation is Opera. And office suite to use is LibreOffice. The best suite out there free or paid.

 

[whitestar_999]

usb 2.0 is too slow.best you can do is move page file to another partition/drive.

 

[d6bmg]

1. Creating page file is not a solution.
2. All you can do is to use lighter software. Seriously use IE6.