New to emulators. Having some issues and ?'s

Hi im new to the site and would like to thank the people who make places like this possible. I have recently discovered emulators and installed Jnes on a family PC running vista, 1.86ghz celeron, and was very excited to see it work, without any problems. I have since gotten the notion to dedicate an older pc to use as my emulator pc, and eventually build a cabinent. Well... I got a 498mhz celeron, with 256 mb of ram, running windows xp professional. Ive since downlaoded an installed 4 different emulators and have the same issue with all of them. The issue is the games run in slow motion, I am getting like 8 fps, (not sure if thats normal). Also when I run them my cpu usage jumps up to %100. Im thinking thats where the problem is coming from? I did a dxdiag and im running dx 8.1 and all three of the things that i read should be enabled are (directdraw or something). When I read the min requirements for jnes it said like 198mhz or higher I thought, and the older emulators like Nesticle which I read to be better for older systems still have the same problems. I got this PC second hand and wondered if a virus on the system could be causing the cpu max out but it only seems to do it when I run the emulators. Thanks for any help!

How much memory do you have?

Do you have a anti virus running if so disable it see if that will speed you up.

Its most likely the old creaky processor causing your problems. Most modern versions of emulators require at least a 1000Mhz processor to run well.

You could try finding and using (very) old versions of some of the emulators.

Overall though I don't think there's anything specifically wrong with the PC, just that modern programs (even emulators) aren't designed to run on hardware that old. I'm pretty sure that the PC only just hits the barest minimum spec for running Xp Pro on its own, let alone actually running software as well as XP Pro.

Its worth mentioning that minimum specs often define what's needed to get a program to run, but don't necessarily equate to usable performance, its also worth checking when the docs were written, some emulators will come with documentation written years ago that's not relevant to current versions of the emulator.

Thanks for the replys. Yea , that is a very good point about min requirements, that I had not thought about. Well thats cool , I got this PC from work for free. So its not like im out anything. Ill find a faster one and give it another try. Thanks again for the quick replys.