The problem is, after the video card exchange, the programs seem to open and close a lot more slowly. Even browsing is a tad slower than before. I don't think the card I bought was that powerful (it's a GeForce 8400) compared to my old card, which I believe was NVidia 6000 series. Any ideas?

You might try uninstalling the drivers and installing the latest from Nvidia. The hardware shouldn't make any difference to speed, in this case at least.

Nope still here. Possibly Vonnie K, though

I get mistaken for you A LOT! Which probably means I should come to a F2F one of these days and meet you in person.

You might try uninstalling the drivers and installing the latest from Nvidia

Did that already. Actually, I didn't bother installing the drivers on CD that came with the purchase -- just went directly to the Nvidia main site and DL'd the latest compatible drivers. Perhaps I shouldn't have done that? Hmm.

just went directly to the Nvidia main site and DL'd the latest compatible drivers. Perhaps I shouldn't have done that?

I don't see why not, as long as you downloaded the right drivers for your card.

I'll check out to make sure that I did install the right drivers. I think the ones I installed were these: [link] They are supposed to be fine for 8-series, which I assumed to include the card I just purchased.

Now, for RAM. My 1GB stick is 3 years old and I read somewhere that it's much better to get a paired RAM than keep the old + add another in terms of performance? Obviously 2 RAM sticks are more expensive than one. Or should I be getting more than 2GB? I think I saw some computers that come equipped with 4GB. If I'm upgrading, maybe I should go for the max possible.

Ooh. I just read something about that (I forget where), but the gist of it was that 2 GB should be adequate for most users. If you run virtual machines or use memory-intensive programs like graphics or video editing, then 4GB would be good.

Now, for RAM. My 1GB stick is 3 years old and I read somewhere that it's much better to get a paired RAM than keep the old + add another in terms of performance?

Perhaps marginally. I don't think you'll see much difference if you just added a 1GB stick without worrying about pairing.

Oh, good. I'll then just buy another 1GB stick for total of 2GB RAM. I had a brief mad period a couple of years back when I was contemplating taking up vidding, but I'd given up on that idea, so 2GB should be plenty.

Someone was telling me that if I'm not doing memory heavy stuff, 2 Gig won't make a lot of difference over 1 Gig. True? False? I do mainly browsing (firefox), word processing, email (thunderbird plus gmail for webmail). Will an upgrade from 1 Gig to 2 Gig not make much difference?

With memory prices being what they are these days, it doesn't make much sense NOT to upgrade.

You should just open up Task Manager, switch to the Performance tab, and there's a meter for how much memory your processes are using. If it's near 100%, then more memory won't hurt. That doesn't mean you'll see a big performance difference if you add memory, some programs will allocate more than they need if they see the available memory, but it's a good quick and dirty test.

Memory prices have gone up recently (a gig still isn't real expensive), and if it's not DDR3 memory they aren't real likely to come down again since the DDR2 and DDR memory supply will shrink. Not that'll probably get real expensive.