no digital cd quality wave recording will work with 48 MB Ram, I'm afraid. With older windows 64 MB may just get by with a squeak, with the newer windows you need 128 MB just to keep windows happy. For XP pro I would be looking at 512 MB Ram. A newer fast hard drive helps, there are many variables, with whole books and articles written on hard drive recording. It's only in the past few years where home pcs have got to the stage where they can easily do it without specialist tweaking. Yet you can get perfect results on a 4 year old laptop too.