I took the computer in and the tech whipped it open and told me what I needed.
The reason I was having trouble opening it was that only one side slides open rather than the whole case coming off as with all of my other computers.
I bought 512 MB of RAM brought it home and installed it to give me a total of 768MB. I tried opening a RAW image and had no problems.
Scampo, writing on BF, made this point >I somehow wonder whether just adding more RAM will solve the problem as when RAM is short, WinXP uses the hard disk to act as a "swap file" to make up for lack of memory. That said, these days 1gb of RAM will make programmes run more quickly.<.
As I said earlier, when I would open an image approx. 240 MB of my Ram would be in use. With the new RAM added, 350 MB seems to be in use. From that I conclude that exactly what Scamo mentioned was probably happening which in turn may account for my slow image processing.
The new RAM was listed online at $89 Cdn but at the store, on the rack, it was labled $69 but that turned out to be an error, $89 was the right price. I was quite prepared to pay the correct price but the store insisted on giving it to me for the displayed priced. Their policy apparently! Nice to get lucky! The tech. didn't charge for looking in the computer so rather a satisfying sequence of events.
Thanks for the input everyone. I'll post how things go.
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