Gnucash isn't that huge, but it goes through this huge amount of effort to draw bar charts which are only sort of pretty, and the effort is noticably less on the laptop. (There's also the irritation that gnucash wants you to save what graphs exist separately on each machine.) MSTS basically does continuous 3-D rendering. So when I got the newest monitor for watertown, I also got a nicer graphics card, but the frame rate is still kind of low (maybe 8 fps) at comparable settings. I'm pretty sure it's not the graphics card that's losing here.

RAM: has 256 MB. If I was starting anew I'd probably get more, but I haven't noticed lack-of-memory being the issue.