Thanks for the reply. No I'm not planning on gaming on it, just running a lot of fairly demanding software.

Please could you recommend specific parts to get? As I said in the first post, I really don't know what I'm doing Money is an issue but not a huge issue as a friend will bring the parts back from the US for me and your parts seem sooo cheap! Are there any other specs or anything you need to know from me before you can recommend stuff?

bump

Anybody?

sqrl is right, your main problem is probably the memory.

What is your budget, and when do you want to upgrade? 

If your budget is under $100, adding a gigabyte of RAM would probably help a lot, since you like to run a lot of programs at the same time. 

The E8500 is probably not worth the price difference over the E8400, so for the next step, I'd recommend the E8400 (around $200), some P35 or G33 based motherboard such as this one  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813127031" ($60 after a rebate) and 2gb of ddr2-800 ram (around $40).   The G33 chipset includes on-board video and P35 does not.  If you want to go this route but save a little money, you can swap the E8400 with E4500 ($125) or E2180 ($80), especially if you want to try overclocking to get better performance.

If you want to spend more and can wait, it might be worth waiting for the Q9450 ($350?) to come out in a month or two, then get the motherboard and memory as above. The benefits of quad-core vs dual-core are debatable though.

If you play games or do anything with 3d graphics then your video card has to come into question as well.

Here is a good question. I really hope someone can help.

I just got 'Z'(yep the 1996 war game from Bitmap Brothers-now they don't exist) from Amazon on the cheap. However I can't get it to run in Vista Home :(
Can anyone help?. I would love to play this game again!
Waiting in hope
Quartz.

*Edit. My system is a Advent Laptop T5300 @1.73Ghz with 2Gb RAM and 945 Video.

16 bit MS-DOS subsystem

C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe

This system does not support full screen mode. choose close to terminate the application. 

I hit ignore but that doesn't work :(

My 2+ year old desktop, in the last few months, has gotten really loud. Fan going overdrive all the time, and *really* loud during moderately CPU/GPU intensive tasks like running a virus scan or a 2-3 year old PC game. It does have a small separate video card. I think it might just be really dusty in there or just components are dying or something because it is left running almost all of the time.

 Might be worth blowing it out with a can of compressed air in short blasts through the vents then giving it a few moments before turning back on to allow any condensation to evaporate.

 no he should remove the side cover and blow it out. That way 90% of the internal dustis removed.

 Now you can answer my question

I have a problem with my laptop. When I am downloading some music off LimeWire (lol >_< ), LimeWire eats my Internet connection at times and I'm unable to use the Internet. I then try to use the diagnostic tool to see if I can fix the problem, but my computer is unable to do so. I am then forced to restart my laptop to use the Internet again. Ssj12, I also read on the new SP1 for Vista that the new SP will update the wireless software so you have more reliability. Would that help my Internet problem and correct it?

 It's quite possible, but the main problem would seem that your laptop is actually to weak to run vista. See if you can get a downgrade to XP.