I took off most of the cruft applications which came bundled with the new laptop, turned off the visual effects, and trimmed down the applications which start up at boot. Now, her laptop uses about 350 - 400MB memory just for being turned on and jumps to about 800MB when she runs Sims, a browser, and her email.

She's not going to get any serious multitasking done but that's not how she uses the laptop.