A few years ago Mac was selling Mac Minis with 512MB of RAM. You need at least 1GB. Fortunatly Apple doesn't move enough products for people to whine and complain like they did when PC makers tried to push Vista out the door on systems with only 512MB.

I was going to buy the memory from a Mac store and have them install it but they were trying to charge $150 for a 1GB stick with "free" installation.

It's standard laptop memory and 1GB can be had from NewEgg.com for all of about $20-30. I ended up just busting out the putty knife and doing it myself.

It's pretty trivial to keep a PC running well: have plenty of memory, clear up unused programs and every few years buy a new hard drive. Like all mechanical things hard drives start to wear down and cause your computer to run really slow. So if you have plenty of memory and you don't have a lot of junk installed and your PC is still slow, chances are it's your hard drive.