1. Check to see if you are paging ram.
To do this open your task manager by pressing control + alt + delete at the same time. Then click on the tab that says performance (XP, Vista). You will see a box that says PF Usage. Further down you will see a box that says Physical Memory (K) on XP or Physical Memory (MB) on Vista. Next to 'Total' is your total system ram. If PF Usage is larger than your Physical Memory you are paging memory and should upgrade your memory or shutdown some running processes.
(Remember to multiply the PF Usage number by 1000 on an XP as XP shows PF Usage in MB and Physical Memory in K)
2. Shutdown unnecessary running processes.
These can be found in several places. The easiest place to clean up is the task bar. The bottom right portion of your screen on a PC is the taskbar. Here you should see things such as your antivirus product running. Many extras such as weather alerts, printer icons, etc are not critical to the computer and are using your system resources. Closing down unneeded applications will free up system memory.
There are many other processes running that you will not see in the taskbar. These can be seen and edited in msconfig. If you are interested I recommend researching how to use the msconfig command as misuse could cause system instability..
Reference the photo above again. In the bottom left corner you will see how many processes are running on the system. A clean windows XP Home or Pro system will generally have below 50 running processes. A Vista machine is usually in the 70's. If you see that your XP machine is running over 70 processes there is certainly some bloat that could be trimmed down!
3. Run system defrag
Think of it like organizing you closet. A defrag will move files you use more often to the front of the closet and those you don't toward the back making it faster to access things.
There are many more things that can be done.
