Performace issues with a new intel Mini

Here's a quick question from a new mac user.
I've just bought a 1.66 intel dual mini with 512MB and to be honest I'm quite surprised how slow it is. It certainly doesn't seem any faster than the ancient PC it replaced. I get considerable lags when switching between applications, for example. Using Word I get delays between hitting the key and letters appearing on screen.
I don't use it for anything special at all just yet - Word, Safari, palm sync stuff. I notice using Activity Monitor that I only have a tiny bit of free memory (7mb or so). Is there anything I can do to improve performance? Has anyone else had similar experiences? I'm reluctant to start doing much else if the performance is already that slow. Any tips would be most welcome.
Will I need to increase my memory? If so, it seems a little disingenuous of apple to market a product that is not really up to running its OS.
mac mini   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Allbran, welcome!
You are certainly not the first to be surprised. As others have mentioned, 512 Meg is not enough to run substantial legacy apps like MS Word and have other programs open too and have good performance.
MS Word was designed for the older PPC processor and runs in emulation (Rosetta) on the Intel Macs.
The only practical solutions are to add more RAM or switch to applications that were programmed for the Intel Macs.
See this link for a discussion of the issues and the range of solutions, which ended in a satisfied user (she upgraded to 2 Gig):
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=3463183
My personal preference would be that anyone selling Macs would make it clear that 512 Meg RAM is not sufficient for anything but casual MS Word use. Unfortunately sellers don't do this, and I suspect many buyers aren't ready to hear it either.
An additional discussion here:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=3528525#3528525
"Having just upgraded my Intel 512 to 2gb, I can tell you that the beach-ball is at rest. I went from complete frustration to really enjoying the machine. I can now run office, dreamweaver, Safari, itunes, and other apps concurrently with no slowdowns at all.
In fact, this is the best-performing Mac I've ever owned, and that covers a lot of machines!"

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