software woes & art

So I have this Wacom Intuos2 tablet. I decide on a whim I want to draw some things, so I install it with no problems. Included with the tablet is a "Power Suite" of software that includes Painter Classic. This is supposedly a program that mimics the effects of pencil, watercolors, etc., the different kinds of mediums that an artist might use. I worked in pencil and watercolors in high school so I figure I'll install this program and give it a whirl.

I install it, and try to run it. I get an error. "Not enough free memory". What?! I have 1.25GB of RAM for pete's sake! I go to Corel's website and do some digging. They don't have any FAQs for Painter Classic, so I look through a FAQ for Painter 5.5 (they are now on Painter 8), figuring that Classic is probably a toned down version of the old software. I find a "fix" because Painter 5.5 had the same issue. I apply said fix (lower virtual memory to lower than 1023), and bring my virtual memory from 1900ish to 1000. Still won't work. WTF?

I had written to Wacom since they packaged the software with their hardware, and also because I couldn't get support from Corel since I didn't own a full version (and I sure as hell wasn't going to pay a 'per incident' charge to call their support line). I was written back with the suggestion to put it below 900MB, or if that doesn't work, my last option would be to buy Painter 8.

Granted Corel has an offer for users of Painter Classic to purchase the upgrade instead of the full version, for $150, but that's really a bit too expensive for me right now. So I try lowering my virtual memory to 800.

Yay! Painter now works, although I wonder how this low VM is going to affect my other programs, since WindowsXP recommends over 1900...

So I just spent the last couple of hours sketching. I was going to draw something to add to my banner here, but I'm not quite sure if it'll fit, or if it will look good if I shrink it to 200px high. I don't think it will be too bad if I do that, the image itself is only 400px high. I just clipped off the extra white space and made it 350x350, I'll show it below, tell me what you think:

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