Thanks for the repsonses. I should tell you that I am good at using a computer but no nothing about its operation or techy stuff. Alll the RAM, ROM, bits and bites stuff is Greek to me.
It is Dell that I bought in 2003
I use XP Home edition as operating system
RAM 512 MB
CPU 2.20 GHz
Check your ISPs speed using this. http://www.speedtest.net/ .
Did speed test and came up with this:
downloads 438 kbs/sec
uploads 367 kbs/sec
ping 320 ms
Is this good?
![Huh ???](https://www.autos.ca/forum/Smileys/CarTalk/huh.gif)
?
Based on suggestion I installed Service pack #3. It took hours to install and in the end my computer does not seem any faster.
One thing to watch is if a lot of programs are running in the background. There's always a few that are needed, but most are not. The toolbar should not be choked with icons.
Ctrl-Alt-Delete (on XP anyway) will bring up a box showing where your CPU's effort is going.
Start-Run-msconfig-startup will show you what programs are loading when your computer starts up.
Suspect I do have a lot of programs running on start up that I do not need. I displayed "Start-Run-msconfig-startup" and saw the list of stuff but I am not sure which ones to remove or how to do that.
I see that it was set to "normal start-up Load all device drivers and services." Should I change it to "Diagnostic startup - load basic devices and services only" ?