max memory for an old computer

hi, I'm trying to help out this friend of mine, she doesn't have much money and wants to upgrade her eMachines Etower 500is with more memory to get performance and stability to an acceptable level, it's a celeron 500mhz and with running XP and all the updates and antivirus and such it's become a dog and is getting unstable, constantly accessing the hard drive, i've done spyware sweeping and checked for resource hogs but didn't find much of anything. the thing is the manufactureer's web site says it can take a maximum of 256mb but's already got 384mb, all of which shows up in 'my computer' so what is the maximum memory this thing can take? also can it take pc133 or does it have to be pc100? I know the speed of the memory won't make the system faster but it may be easier to find pc133 in bigger size memory

Emachines made a lot of 370 computers using the Intel 810 chipset which if I remember correctly has a max of 512MB Ram. PC 133 should work but default to PC 100.

That board should handle 512 megs. Also you should get xplite off shareaza and run that to shut down all the extra stuff that xp runs in the background. There are alot of things that you can turn off and it will speed up the computer quite a bit. Plus make sure you use a good defrag program like diskeeper. The one that comes with windows sucks. Good Luck.

It could also be the Hard drive causing trouble. If it is from the same era as pc100 then it is really slow. With XP it will not be limited to the 8.6 gigs that 98 was. Modern hd's are so much faster it is insane. A better hd can be had for less then 50.00 and maybe even the 80 gig 7200.10 perps with are way faster the that era hd's.

ok, thanks all for the advice