Your 4 year old compaq is far from slow, its probably well beyond what you need. Reinstall windows, consider hard drive replacement (though not really necessary), and perhaps additional memory (RAM). Both cheap upgrades, and would get years more out of it....a new computer won't seem much faster, and this is a bad time to buy, because you'd end up with Vista instead of XP. At least wait another year or two and get a system pre-loaded with Windows 7...which will be way better.

Heck, I am using systems that are over NINE years old as some of my servers, and they handle that task with ease. My present computer is over 3 years old, and still keeps up with everything that I do....which is a lot!

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