Yay! I upgraded my home PC with some RAM (512MB that should have been recognised as 784MB - see my previous diary entry) and a 750MHz P3 bought off eBay and I can see the dramatic improvement this upgrade has brought to my system compared to the 128MB RAM and a 450MHz P2 that I had on this PC. My system now scores 1280 on 3DMark 2001 compared to 585 before the upgrade! More importantly, GCC 3.4 now does a clean bootstrap in ~2 hours instead ~3.5 hours earlier! I now eagerly await my GeForce 3 graphics card, also bought off eBay, so that I can enjoy Half Life 2!