I got a PC from my friend today which is pretty old. It's an Athlon XP at 2.00GHz with just 256mb of RAM (see my thread in the classifieds if you can help with that lol).

Basically I'm just popping in here to ask what software is going to run quickest on this setup? I need:

Browser
Music player (including internet streams - specifically, Dubstep FM)
Mail client
Word processor
Probably some other stuff that I'm forgetting lol

The machine is currently running TinyXP. I can't and won't change operating systems - I need this one for the software I'm making unfortunately.

Thanks in advance.

Browser, something like portable firefox? Or if you really want to strip off the features, something like the text-only browser, lynx.
Wordpad for a word processor?
Would web mail of some description be better, as a web page shouldn't hog to many resources...

The PC you describe would have been a dream machine 10 years ago, so what you want is 10 year old software. Modern software uses lots of memory, which is the main thing you lack. My media centre is only an XP 2500 and works brilliantly because it has 1GB.

I hate to say it, but I'd stick with Microsoft for most things. If you've got a copy of Office '95 or '97, then it's very capable and it loads incredibly fast. Failing that, Wordpad really isn't that bad for most jobs. I'd steer clear of Open Office because it's a huge bloated beast.

For browsing, if it already has IE6 then stick with it. Any modern browser will be fatter and run more slowly in limited memory. You can try Chrome and Firefox, but they will load slower and intensive tabbed browsing uses up a lot of memory. FF on this machine is using 600MB and I only have 4 tabs open! Because IE 6 used the same resources as Windows, it was very much more efficient than any alternative.

For email, Outlook Express 6 was very light and fast. Much more so than anything except perhaps Popcorn which is rather basic.

I'd rely on Windows firewall rather than a third party product.

For media, VLC does everything and is extremely light weight compared to most alternatives. Although I love Winamp and it's derivatives, it's not exactly slim.

For security, I'd install Aunty Vera. It's the lightest one I've tested and it works well. I'd also install Spybot, and use the "immunize" function to make IE less vulnerable. I would not enable Teatime for various reasons. Unfortunately, you can't use a ten year old version of AVG or whatever because you need the updates to work.

Oh yes, anti-virus. I had forgotten about that!

I've not heard of Vera but I'll have a search and get it installed.

I'm really not keen to use FireFox because I know that it's awful with memory. Perhaps the new version is slightly better, but I'm still not really willing to give it a try.

Wordpad will do nicely, I had forgotten about it!

I'm using iTunes as my media player now and it's fine - takes a few seconds to maximise and minimise properly but once it's done it's nice and responsive.

Hopefully I'll be able to whack a couple of GB of memory in the machine at some point - I'm sure it will be at least twice as responsive.

Thanks for your help and suggestions guys.

http://www.free-av.com/

You probably have heard of it, but I always call it something silly.

Google Chrome would probably be your best bet for a browser, or Opera.