Originally Posted By: mrsilv04
This computer has a whopping 96MB of memory installed!
Ugh. Unless you can find some RAM real cheap/free, you may be better off just finding another PC to give to them. Granted, XP is almost as old as that computer (it came out at the end of 2001 if I remember correctly) but even XP Home will choke on so little RAM. I've used XP (or at least tried to) with 128mb and a fast (at the time) Pentium 4 CPU and it was just painful. I'd consider 256mb to be the minimum you'd want to even try to use. Besides, you may be able to get XP to install and run with 96mb, but I would guess that Word would probably be a slide show if it opened at all.
I'd suggest looking for a deal on something off eBay, or maybe a refurb from Dell Outlet or similar. Not that anyone's made of money nowadays, but for the best results, finding the absolute cheapest computer you can find online or a big box store would be lightyears ahead of the Win98 machine you're trying to resurrect. Better yet, if you can find something that doesn't come preloaded with Windows (usually a flavor of Ubuntu or Linspire), you can save some money by wiping the hard drive and install your copy of XP on that.
Remember, you're giving this away to family which means you'll be their Geek On Call. The better the machine is, the less headache it will be for you to support!