Yes, you certainly need more RAM, much more.  Our GIS / image processing machines on XP run with 2 -4 GB of the fastest RAM that the motherboard will take.

Meanwhile, there is a patch that will help - if you have more than one hard drive, that is physical HDD, not just one drive split into several logical drives.  Tech support below is absolutely correct, disk writes are much much slower than memory processes.  You can however speed them up by distributing the writes across two disks - if you have two disks.

The game is to have the virtual memory working on one disk, and the program and operating system working on another, that way interim writes to pagefile (the disk extension of RAM) occur on another disk than interim writes to the data file.

On my XP64 bit - My Computer / Properties / Advanced /Performance - Settings / Advanced / Virtual Memory - set the virtual memory on a drive that does not have your operating system and programs installed (usually C).  Eliminate any Pagefile on C and reboot.  Itīll work faster until you get the RAM upgraded.

Cheers,

Pat

At 17:52 15-03-2009, WinTopo Support wrote:

--- In wintopo@yahoogroups.com, "coosbaylumberco" <coosbaylumberco@...> wrote:
> ...
> Do I need more RAM, is computer too old, or what?

For the size of image you are processing you would benefit hugely from more RAM. Most of your 256Mb will be consumed just by WindowsXP before WinTopo even gets a look-in.
If your system runs low on RAM while WinTopo is processing then WinTopo uses the hard-drive swap-space as extra RAM in order to try to complete the process. However, hard-drive swap-space access is about 1000 times slower than RAM, and so the processing can take a long time when that happens.
Fortunately, RAM is very cheap these days and you can buy a Gb for just a few dollars. Upgrade your RAM - it should make a lot of difference to the speed of your machine when processing large images.

From: The WinTopo Support Team