Hard drive performance is usually not as important as you think. The operating system makes a small difference in performance. You can run ArcView wickedly fast for very little hardware cost. Naturally the performance you get varies with how you use ArcView and the context of its use on your machine. Keep that in mind as you read the following.
Performance is directly proportional to score.
The general linear model results for this set of factors are appended to this message for you statistical mavens. Thus, the potential effect of increased RAM might simply be incorporated in the CPU effect. People do not report video settings when they report MarkView results. Here's one way to tell. MarkView scores are not adequate measures of ArcView performance simply because the test does not control for differences in video resolution, color depth, and ArcView window size.