John Connor wrote: I don't see what the processor has to do with how much memory you can install.  It depends on your motherboard configuration and specs.  WinXP can use 3GB of RAM. And what about your graphics card or onboard graphics chip?

This computer had 500Mbyte of memory when I bought it. When I had another 500Mbyte added, I was told that I couldn't have any more.

I was a field engineer for a company that charged Ł1,000 for 2kbytes of memory = 50p/byte - in the days of core stores - and I worked on a project for the US Navy that used a core store for ROM. It had a reset wire going thru all cores then a 'page wire' was threaded thru cores to set a one or round a core to leave a zero - then X and Y wires used to read the content. The store was 20 bits wide x 64 words and there were about 50 page wires - and we thought that we had done well to get this working at 1Mhz - so today's specs seem pretty impressive to me.

Later, I had a BBC micro with 32k of RAM memory - and some of that was used for the screen so only about 20k available for programs.

Anyway, I should have said earlier today "Copy this link into you web browser and click on the link on that page - or try 

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stonebanks/screenshot.JPG "

I have asked about a new mother board which should do the job but my contact is in hospital so that will be a few days before I can do anything.

Thanks for your help.

I've had EasyCAD, LibreCAD, A9CAD, and ProgeCAD all running ok. EasyCAD would be my choice. EasyCAD is Ł240 (I might pay up), otherwise ProgeCAD looks as tho it will probably do what I need.

I had AutoCAD but it was slow - it's a massive program  - I suspect a lot of disk swapping - and I only paid Ł20 for it on-line so I was a bit wary about it. I've now deleted it.

Only DraftSight has the drawing area obliterated with rubbish - and I did download the latest revision today but no improvement. I'll delete it from my machine and download a completely new copy.