Thank you one and all for your very illuminating points of view.
Actually, that's a lie. I haven't a clue what most of you just said.
Anyway, my extra 2gb of memory went in today and all is well. PC seems to be running better than before. Difficult to remember really as I have been running it for the past week with just 1gb of RAM. God that is sloooooow.
Cheers.