Seems strange that its going so slow with those spec's?
I dont have a problem on my desktop thats far below those specs, AMD athalon 1.8 Ghz, 1 gig RAM, Gforce 4000 (or something like tha, so old I cant rememberwaht it is!), my laptop blisters through things, as its a lot higher performance than my desktop, Intel dual core 2.26 GHz, etc etc etc.
Seems strange, but than agian I've had some problems with another PC at work thats got an ATI card in, that seems to relly struggle with maya, textures are all over the shop and it runs really slow, then all of a sudden speeds up!
Whats your friends specs? It could be the graphics card as the ATI's are not qualified on autodesks charts (as far as I can remember), neiter are Gforces but it seems that you vcan get away with most of them (my desktops got one in and my laptops got a Gforce 7900 GTX with 512 of DDR3 Ram) and like I said I dont have any problems.
"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle