I went away & it suddenly dawned on me that I think the minimum requirements for OSX is 128 MB of RAM. If that's all you've got, then it doesn't leave much room for ram available for running any other apps. It reminds me of when I bought 1 of the 1st power macs. It had barely enough ram for the operating system, but trying to run anything else was a pain & very, very slow. The problelm with the bottom level comps on market is just what happened to me, they only have the most minimal amount of ram. Even if you use virtual memory it's going to slow things down. Depending on your model, I think your eMac will use PC133 ram, same as most earlier G4's use. And yours can have a maximum of 1 GB RAM (2 x memory slots!) That ram is a lot cheaper nowadays & a small investment in increasing your ram will make your life on your emac a much easier & happier one I can assure you (also for your comp.)