Atheist: I almost though I was the only one with a nicely specced x86 on the side :-)
Turn off the virtual memory. You find it in settings/system/advanced/advanced/virtual mem. Or something like that. There are no drawbacks unless you use Photoshop which refuse to start without VM.
To avoid crashes stop using IE. Dunno if it's networking related or browser related but my setup has been rock stable and the only difference between me and the rest of the world
is that I don't have my x86 connected to the internet. The only time it has ever crashed is when I tried to play some weird old 16-bit games with screenmodes not supported by my Matrox Parhelia512 graphics board (kaboom!).
The general performance of XP just suck! I mean the Parhelia is probably the hottest 2D hardware out there and XP still suffers from bad timing and sluggishness. Redhat isn't much better either.
