Numerous well-known PC manufacturers (HP, eMachines, Gateway, etc.) sold lots of PCs with only 256MB installed RAM in 2001-2002, when XP was first released. These were heavily advertised (both by big-box stores like Circuit City, Best Buy, Sears, Wal-Mart etc., and direct-from-manufacturers), bargain-priced PCs selling for around $550-$1000 or so at that time.
Many unknowledgable PC buyers bought them, trusting that a reputable name-brand computer bought from a big-name retailer would surely be a "good" computer.
They soon enough found that they ran like crap, not like what they had been led to expect from the Windows XP ads on their TeeVees, and concluded that something must be broken, or maybe they had gotten a "lemon." The problem in fact, however, was that they had been built with too little memory, compounded by the manufacturer having pre-installed a shit-load of bloated, hastily and poorly-designed crapware.
When users went back to the big-box stores to complain, as often as not they would be sold some useless "Magical PC Tune-Up/Optimize" suite package for $79.95, or a "bigger, better" bloated antivirus program.
When these solutions not only didn't help but in fact exacerbated the problems, the users would eventually take their PC to a local computer shop to be "fixed." If the local shop was more competent than the know-nothing staff at the big-box store, and honest, they'd explain that their shiny new computer had been built with insufficient memory, offering to add more for $100 or so.
The users assumed that they were being scammed by a computer con-artist, because, after all, this was an expensive, name-brand computer -- HP (or Dell, or Gateway etc.) would not be building computers with too little memory to run right.
If they called the manufacturer's tech support to ask about this, the manufacturers' asses were covered by Microsoft, who claimed that XP would run on 128MB memory, but the recommended minimum was 256MB.
A competent local computer shop could have built a better-performing computer with twice as much memory, decent-quality components, and without all the crapware, and sold it for the same or lower price (making a very small profit, however, since they do not have the large volume purchasing power discounts gotten by the big-name brands.) But most people bought the big-name PCs because of the aura of quality associated with those names, thanks to their TeeVees.
Many of those 256MB PCs ended up in landfills a couple of years later, as consumers got tired of living with the slowness and freeze-ups and went out and bought new ones, probably from a different big-name brand than their previous one. By this time, manufacturers had increased their minimum memory to 512MB, so the new PCs did run better, confirming (in the users' minds) that either their first PC just happened to be a "lemon", or that their first PC's brand-name manufacturer was a bad one, to be avoided in the future, and that the local computer shop who tried to sell them the memory was indeed a con-artist.
So all of those unethical PC manufacturers sold two PCs instead of just one, their stock prices went up, their CEOs got multi-million dollar bonuses, and everyone lived happily ever after, except for the ethical local computer shop, which has gone out of business, and the earth, whose landfills are full of crap that shouldn't be there, consisting of precious, finite raw materials mined from the earth and rapidly converted into junk at a very nice profit by the unethical big-name computer manufacturers.
So the big name corporations in this way make plenty of money with which to buy politicians who will lower their taxes, allow them to hide money in the Cayman Islands banks, outsource manufacturing, support and most everything offshore, bust the dockworker and truckers unions who might try to force them to pay an honest wage to deliver the junk to the big box stores, and allow media consolidation so that Fox News can control what information people are allowed to get from the newspapers and television networks, which will advertise the junk and convince people to blame the migrant Mexicans and "unauthorized" sources of information, like Wikileaks, for all their problems. Is this a great country, or what!
(Note to Original Poster: Even though it would put you in good company (HP, et al.) to do so, I would not recommend building your friend's computer with 256MB. But you figured that out already, right?)
