Thank you gentlemen for your kind suggestions. While I place myself at about 3 on the 1-10 scale of computer guru-ness, I can assure you that both my RAM sticks are PC133 SDRAM and the motherboard is completely happy with them.
To clarify my argument, which was originally painted with a fairly broad brush, I never meant it to apply to anybody who had any above-average demands of any sort, graphics, games, mathematics, whatever. I reiterate that for average Joes like myself who surf the net and use office applications, occasionally diversifying into mpegs of arthouse movies involving gratuitous nudity, I find it hard to justify anything more than, OK, let's call it a Pentium 500 for the sake of argument to include reasonably large databases.
Now I'm sure the computer magazines with their performance measuring equipment could make a mockery of my argument, but in the long run, does it matter whether your search takes one second or three seconds?
That's all I meant, really!
Ronbmy, while I know naught of Fast Find, I have never had any problems with Office97 in the five years I've been using it with Win98SE. Maybe I'm just lucky....