A few months ago I priced RAM upgrades, but Butch uses very old-school RAM, and it turned out that the maximum upgrade possible, which would still be little more than a Gigabyte, would cost about half as much as a new laptop far more powerful than the upgraded Butch would be. Right now I can't afford either one. Since I installed the new firewall and anti-virus, boot time has increased alarmingly, and everything else has slowed as well.
I suppose I'll just have to reduce the number of browser tabs I have open at any given time, and severely limit the number of memory-hogging pages such as Google Maps street views that I try to use. Oh, and Flickr. I don't know what Yahoo did to Flickr in its latest round of changes, but it now takes forever to open a page there. Luckily I can still use LJ's old comment pages, because the new ones are as slow as Flickr.
But I do have to think about getting Butch replaced, as he's probably not worth the cost of upgrading at this point, despite his 2.66GHz processor, which I'm sure is still adequate to the sort of tasks I do. There's also the fact that, compared to the new laptops available, Butch is an energy hog. I hate to think of moving everything to a new computer, though. I actually still have some files trapped on Sluggo that I never got around to moving to Butch. I'm sadly lacking in both patience and organizational skills. I fear that I'm gradually joining Butch in obsolescence.