My boss asked me to replace the hard drive in one of his computers, a Compaq Presario 7000, all went well until after the installation when it started acting like a Compaq, if you know what I mean....it freezes several times upon start up and while it's running, it's got an AMD processor, 1.2ghz (not sure which kind) and 256mb DDR PC3200 memory in the form of two 128mb sticks, the HD is a 320gb Western Digital 7200rpm (yeah I know, a bit like building a chef's kitchen in a shacky farmhouse) and it's got Windows XP Professional Student Media installed. I know that WinXP only requires 64mb memory to run but should I advise him to upgrade the memory to the most it can hold (512mb with 2 256mb sticks)?
Also, when it freezes I'm not even really doing anything on it, for instance, it froze while trying to activate Office....

I would advise the upgrade-- RAM is the biggest "bang-per-buck" upgrade-- and frankly-- I would not want to run a PC with 64 MB of RAM.
I take their "minimum" & double it (at least)-- that's MY minimum...

There are many functions in XP that are enabled by default-- that most never use.Black Viper's Windows Config guide-- can help speed your PC greatly-

Windows XP Home and Professional Service Pack 2 Service Configurations by Black Viper

but in this case ... I would add the RAM anyway

Thanks, I'll let him know, I also would never run XP on 64mb (well, I might actually just out of curiosity...) I firmly believe that in order to run XP efficiently you should have atleast 512mb

I first had 128-- and it was slowwwww.......
When I upgraded my hardware-- I went straight to 2 gigs. Never regretted that. RAM is so cheap--up to the point that hardware/OS will support-- and demand for it won't go down soon.

Actually yesterday I upped the memory in a friend's computer, it went from 256 to 768, the difference was noticeable.

He replaced the memory in it and it works better, there are still probs but that's compaq related....