the machine is a Dell Inspiron 510M laptop. I fear that it has insufficient grunt to run the suggested Toshiba multimedia hub.
Her desktop machine is also getting a bit tired and doesn't like to run IE and Skype and Messenger and Firefox and an email browser (I forget which one she prefers) and ........ all at the same time in real time. This is why some of the tasks are moved onto the laptop, the ones that don't need keyboard input to use (she only answers Skype in a customer service desk sort of way, just one mouse click).
I have a cunning plan, I have just ordered the bits to build a 3.0 GHz Phenom II Quad core system which ought to be up to speed for a while.
Rans6....