Hello. I am trying to keep four computers working on the project, although my wife’s old HP Pavilion 734n is not too happy with the load and sometimes stalls out (makes my wife cranky if it interferes with her computer time so sometimes I just run it overnight).
I recently brought a 734n back to life. If the system is clean (no dust), then load it up with RAM. It will take 2 GBs if you want to spend that much.
Faster video and a better hard drive are also nice. The HD is only 5400 rpm, and now 7200 rpm is standard. A new ATI video card will run the GPU core well and speed up the system a lot.
This type of system will run very well with 1 Gb of RAM after a thourough defrag of the drive.
I also set slower systems down to 60% to 80%, and set breakpoints to 30 minutes. F@H is not supposed to slow systems down much, but in real life the hard drive writes can take a while (20 seconds).
I am running the ATI X1650 AGP card with 512 MB. Not the fastest, but I didn’t need a new power supply just for the video card. It gets about 150 ppd by itself.