1 GB of RAM
that's the bare minimum I'd run on a computer these days. If you have a bit of cash at some point you might consider upgrading that. Since you have a DEll its pretty easy to figure out what RAM works with your computer, just go to support.dell.com find the place to type in your service tag, then go to the RAM portion. RAM is pretty cheap lately. You can't use more than 4 GB unless your runing a 64 bit OS (unlikely) but you can put 3 or 4 GB in and have a much faster computer.