I think that way as well but who knows why people keep older systems?

I understand that many large banking institutions are still running XP SP3 systemwide as they haven't gotten their specialty software upgraded for Win7 yet. Such things are one reason M$ has continued to push back the abandonment of support for XP.

In it's day XP was excellent...unfortunately with the patches and service packs it's bloated and slow.

But if you're out of memory and need to maintain an older system, more ram will perk it up, assuming, of course, you can still find proper ram for the board you have (and that the board will support it).

In any event, I'm going to assume that the OP isn't one of the twelve people who bought XPx64, so more than 2gb is a true waste of money.

OP, if in looking at the performance tab you are just barely "overlimit" then a new video card with dedicated ram may give you the best bang for your buck. That will release the shared RAM so your system can use it and vram is faster anyway.