sundevil13,
Get as much memory as you can afford. I run 781 Mb and haven't had any problems, but if you can get a "gig" of memory , then do so. If you've never installed a "memory" chip before, have a friend do it for you. If your computer is still under warranty, have the store where you bought it from do it for you. Trust me, I went through this two years ago with a memory upgrade-got a bad chip, and hosed the o.s.(XP). But took my computer back to Best Buy, and got everything runn'in correctly for free..gotta love the extended warranty that best buy sells-got a new power supply two months ago-for free.