I currently have two pc's set up in my home office. The first one is a Dell Dimension with 512 MB DDR RAM, P4 2.8 Ghz. There are quite a few peograms on here which I use on a daily basis. The most important one is a stock market scaaning program called "Strategy Desk" from Ameritrade. I input my custom formulas and desired list of symbols, and the program scans the web and yields certain results. Lately, I have been receiving messages stating I am low on virtual memory. This prmopted me to set up my 2nd PC, a HP xw4100 with 1.5 DDR Ram, and P4 3.0ghz. The Hard Drive was wiped clean and a fresh version of Windows XP SP2 was installed. I updated the network drivers to get on the web and install Strategy Desk. Bearing in mind that Strategy Desk is the ONLY program I have installed on this machine, when I run a scan identical to the one I run on my Dell, the scan takes more than twice as long to complete. This is a bit confusing to me since the Dell has 1/3 the amount of RAM, and is running many more programs during the scan then the HP (which is running no other programs). I realize there is a multitude of possible issues effecting the HP's performance, but just based on the side by side specs, I am at a loss as to why the scan is so much slower. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
PS. Both machines have 40gig dirves if that matters