The Slow surfing problem is tricky. Try a bandwidth test to see if she's getting the speeds she should be from her connection. Also make sure there are no proxies enabled on her connection ( unless she requires one to surf ), waiting for a non-existent proxy server to time-out makes surfing a painful experience. Also make sure you dump the Internet Cache and resize it to something small ( caches were useful in the glory days of dial-up, they don't really speed up anything these days, especially with a lot of sites being dynamically generated anyway ). If she's on a high-speed connection, the cache should be set to 0, if she's on dial-up, experiment and find one that works for you.
In terms of slow switching between programs, that's a factor of both the memory and the HDD. If both programs are in memory, then it's usually going to be a quick transfer. If one of those programs has been swapped out to the swapfile, then the system has to 1) Free up enough Memory to load that application back from the swapfile by writing out a chunk of memory to the swapfile and 2) Reading the program back from the swapfile and writing it back to memory, so that's 2 disk accesses, on what is most likely a very fragmented file system. If there is a lot of HDD access during program switches, then that's your most likely culprit. Try to reduce the size of the swapfile ( 2 Gig's is to much for an older system, especially on a 6 gig drive, 1 Gig is probably better ).
Also, it may be that she's used to working on something faster at work or has used a friends machine that's faster, and now percieves her system as slow. Try to teach her to only open applications she needs, and close them when she's done with them. A lot of applications open at the same time will needlesly consume memory and generate a lot more page fault, which will lead to a lot more swapping.
As other people have mentioned, make sure you do a virus scan with an up to date anti-virus engine, or one of those online scans. Some of these things can be pretty insidious and they will run in the background eating up system resources on you.
If you cannot find the original installation media, and she has a valid OS license, she can purchase the Media from Microsoft for a small fee, it's not the physical disc they make money off of, it's the license they sell you to run the software ( which she should already have ).
Again there are a lot of tweaks you can make to a system to improve performance, and the only way to find out what's going to work on that particular machine is to experiment. In this case, Google is probably your best friend! I also saw someone mention about the system not liking the memory that's in there, it could be that there is some sort of conflict there, and even if the BIOS reports 512 Megs, it may not be able to use all of that memory. You could do some research on the motherboard and find out what kind of memory it should be using, and what kind of memory is installed. Just make sure to ground yourself on the case if you decide to go poking around the insides :).
Good luck with everything!
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