The main reason i asked was my XP home edition machine is running with
only 28 apps so a big differance to my unknowlagable eyes.
That sounds fine for XP. I haven't made an inventory of all the junk added in Windows 7, but I'm sure the minimum process count is substantially higher.
I will see if i can delete some of the "crap" that now comes preloaded
although last time i did that a recovery to factory default was nesc
Take a backup first. I prefer Acronis TrueImage, but I guess Norton Ghost is roughly equivalent. With a disk-image backup you can be back up and running in a few minutes even if you mess things up royally.
PS-machine only cost $289 so i thinks installing more memory just an't worth it.
Memory is one of the cheapest ways to improve performance. But just because you have a boatload of mystery processes in execution doesn't mean that you're necessarily short of physical memory. As long as they are not all fighting for a dispatch or memory allocation at once, what you have now might be fine.