Honestly I'm having trouble thinking that setup can't run what you stated. Weird. The only bottleneck there is possibly the CPU or something else going on on the PC that you're not aware of (hard drive fragmentation, spyware/malware/virus, etc).
What you could do is remove the bloatware files that start up on their computer and increase fix the virtual memory to around 3 gigs. Startup program removal. Run > msconfig> startup tab Unclick files that they don't use (only names you recognize) like adobe acrobat 32, AIM, qtime, Real player. It's all abbreviated, but if you drag out the command tab to see the full path and name, you'll get a good clue what junk is being started up and causing your startup time stretch to into minutes. Plus when you see the full path and name, you'll know where that AOL is hiding. The path will be something like "C:\Program Files\AOL" Increasing Virtual Memory- Hold Windows key and press E Look for My Computer and right click it Properties Advanced System Settings From here, I think it's "Advanced tab" and Virtual Memory. Custom Size-> Change both Min and Max to around 3 gigs Apply -There's a diminishing return for the size of the virtual memory. The sweet spot is somewhere around 2.5-3 gigs. -If you have a partition, like a recovery drive that has that much space, then dump it there and leave the C drive with zero memory. If you don't know what I mean, just ignore this -I would download a program like CCcleaner and run it once to remove dangling garbage that stuck around. Afterwards you defragment, which could take up hours, and see how much faster it runs from these easy steps...
Get an Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 (3.33GHz stock) and pair it up with an Asus P45 Mobo with DDR2 slots. Overclock the CPU to +4GHz.
The current set up should run all those applications fast enough that you wouldn't even notice the difference with a new computer. You got another problem if the computer can't run spreadsheets/ outlook/ etc. quickly.
