1. Some systems have this problem but not all, can't figure out what the cause is yet.
2. New versions of Chrome optimize for SSD, so it takes a long time to start on HDD, defragmentation speeds it up a bit, but it's still far away from the startup speed on SSD.
3. Memory consumption is relatively small, depends on the amount of RAM, for example on a netbook with 1GB of memory after startup Chrome uses 300MB, but on a computer with 4GB of memory already 500MB. It also strongly depends on the number of installed extensions, for example one uBlock Origin uses 100MB of RAM. I tested on a similar computer, C2D E6700 4GB RAM, XP x64, 32 and 64 bit version of Supermium. 32 bit version is even a bit faster, but memory consumption is a bit less, so it is not necessary to use 64 bit version on x64 OS.