How much power?

I have a P4 2.4 mghtz (pre-hyperthreading) and am trying to run the standard poker suite: PAHUD, PT, Party, MTH and a AHK script that includes joystick functioning. How much more power do I need? Curretly things get pretty choppy depending on how much processor power PAHUD is using. There does not seem to be a RAM issue just processor power. Is anyone running thse programs successfully? Do I need a hyperthreading processor?

TIA,
-Bishop