Yes, the lower system resources get, the slower things get until win98 crashes through low resources, that was what I hated most about. I was continually rebooting to avoid a crash.

It is a bit of a steep learning curve from win98 to XP, but you can control it rather than the other way round, you just need to know how ;D

I think you would be hard pressed to run XP on your current system anyway and may find that many of your programs wont run and some of the hardware may be incompatible. So you may well be best to stick with win98 until you decide to upgrade or replace you system.