Hello, Thank you for your reply. I once created a very minimal XP system that was able to run Excel 2007 but no networking. I ran it in a virtual machine, and indeed the system booted very fast and appeared to be fast also. I'd like to try this again but this time support networking so that the system can run either IE or Chrome and connect to the internet via DHCP. It appears to me that the system might at least boot faster ... the old computer has about 80 GB of hard drive and 800 MB or so ram and is 1.3 Ghz or so machine. thank you, Daniel