I would like just to play the PMI sample set for either of these
pianos through a PIII 800 laptop running Win2k. I intend to upgrade
its memory to 768M from 256M.

I have tested a demo sample set from PMI and this runs fine through a
demo version of Kontakt, but I am not very fond of Kontakt's user
interface, the weird font is very hard to read. (also the fact that
the demo version blasts you with white noise every couple of minutes
really sods me off - how the hell are you supposed to evaluate sound
quality with *that* blasting your ears off randomly!).

I have an external Roland UA20 which appears to run just fine. The
question is:-

Of the software sampler products, which is the least expensive product
which will allow me to play these samples - latency is acceptable
through Kontakt and I think is 10ms, which will do fine. Not crashing
would also be kind of important.

Which of the software sampler products has the least onerous copy
protection e.g dongle rather than convoluted
challenge/response/internet activation key etc. I rebuild my machine
every now and again and I am damned if I want the hassle of
reactivating the darn software every time. (I've heard Giga are very
poor in customer support in this area, for instance).

I just want to play the samples, with probably 8 velocity layers being
fine - this should, I imagine, just about fit into the available
memory.

Can anyone make any recommendations? Much obliged to you all.