For starters he needs two harddrives, one for the audio and another for the OS and apps.
We sure could use some more information.
It's understanable if he's running out of CPU if he's using s**tloads ofplug-insand 50 audio tracks. But it could also be a whole different story, like someting's malfunctioning.
Guess we'll better leave this to THE MAN.
Give it up for Opus...

You Know Eskimo, one of the largest improvements I made was multiple drives.

It takes the strain off the eitire system and it is inexpensive!

Run a tower full of drives and have speed even with a dual mobo celeron 400 and scsi it is quite fast.

You can also run multiple burners while surfing the web!

Downloads and uploads and surfing and printing and buring all at the same time with no strain.

He says his system is slow with realtime plugins. Well they will bog down even the most powerful systems (especially the Waves 'verb, geez that thing is a CPU killer). I'd suggest tracking as dry as possible, then rendering effects later. I wonder if a 10Ghz P4 with 5Gb ram could handle many muliples of that Waves reverb alogorithm. That 10Ghz chip is not too far away, relativly speaking(unless you're over sixty, then I guess 5Ghz is about all you'll ever see) :eek: J/K

No bogs at all here with the celeron (long in the tooth) processors.

Even c4 is a breeze with les than 20% being used.

Internet computers being used as audio computers is a no no. Clogedge. 101

Well obviously 256MB is not enough to begin with. I would up that to 512 minimum..more if available...get one stick of 512 and put that in front of the 256 so he would have 768MB worth of it.
Two hard drives is definitely the way to go in the long run. The CPU will be fine if he's just doing home stuff and not major recordings and so forth.
Make sure to tell him to get the same manufacturer of memory as his other stick. It's always the smart route to take.
Opus

I would highly recommend a UAD-1 card. It will take the processing load off of your CPU and it's plugins will sound better than 90% of the other plugs available. It is well worth the money and will free your computer's processing to do other tasks. I would do this in conjuction with an extra drive and more RAM as Opus suggests. Make sure your new drive is at least 7200 speed (most new drives are fine). Put all your recording files on the separate drive and defrag often. Get rid of all unneccesary programs running in the background as they will affect performance as well (press ctrl + alt + del to see them). When you run into problems with too many plugs (which you will without the UAD-1) render the plugin to a new file to save resources.