One of our division were running what you have. They put together their own machines on a tight budget and wanted our three dell workstations; because ... We opened the assembly in six minutes, they only had two machines that would open the same assembly and it was 26 & 32 minutes. They were not using simplified rep and every part seemed to be a family table.
We had to move swap to 1g to match 1g of ram. You can double your swap of ram ... but much more doesn't really help. Also, we have 15000rpm hard drives and are on a 100mg network.
So, check ram & swap, get smart in simplified reps & use them, and put a business case together for the big workstation.