nef
You don't have parts lying around where you can put together a more capable machine for him? Heck, I've got three cases doing nothing at the moment. If I upgrade my wife's case I will have four.
Not enough to build a machine. I have some ram lying around but it's full size sticks of ECC ram, this uses the special laptop type ram that are shorter. I put a SD card from my camera in it for readyboost, it seems to have made a slight improvement, but HDD is still thrashing like crazy. Just been uninstalling crap that comes preinstalled, maybe there's something in there that's causing lot of HDD writes. Could do a defrag after too. It's still an improvement over what it was and now it's clean, so think I'll end up just giving it to him as is and tell him it's just a slow machine and not too much can be done. I'll check with my sister if she wants to buy a SSD. I could pay half and say it's a gift.
Come to think of it I recall when these first came out, the hospital I worked at was looking into them for doctors to use for Meditech, but they came with Linux. We had toyed with doing Citrix or RDP, but don't think that ever took off. They ended up going with COWs. (computer on wheels

)