Computer running slowly

My computer has 256MB RAM and yet it still keeps running slowly at the moment, even when I'm not running many programs. The only thing I know that helps is emptying the Temporary Internet Files folder...is there anything else I can do to make it a little faster again? Does the amount of files I have affect the speed of the computer?

What version of Windows? XP? CTRL+ALT+DEL and check under processes and see what's running. Especially look for anything that's constantly using the CPU. Check under Performance; you should be idling at close to 0% CPU usage. If you're idle, and your CPU is stil getting used, figure out what's doing it and disable it. Maybe check for spyware/adware, lots of threads about that here already. Disable any programs that try to auto-start themselves at bootup, like stupid Real players; anything that puts an icon in your system tray down by the clock, get rid of as many as you can. Things like the MS Office auto-start toolbar or whatever, get rid of that if you have it.

In general Windows becomes slower and slower the more you use it over time. Unavoidable. Eventually you'll have to reinstall Windows, and then it'll be fast again for a few months. You could always use some more RAM too, if you do a lot of RAM-intensive things. XP itself probably needs at least 128MB. 256MB isn't very much for XP. Disgusting, but that's how it is.

Emptying Temporary Internet Files won't do anything I know of except possibly speed up Internet Exporer (and also slow down how fast it loads some web pages, since it no longer has them cached). The amount of files you have theoretically shouldn't do a thing. You could try defragging your hard drive though. Might help incrementally.

Wow, I never really looked at that Performance bit before, it's useful seeing what's taking up the memory. I do have XP, yeah, so maybe I should consider getting some more RAM.

Thanks for the help :)

256 MB is evil on XP - too much page swapping going on on my laptop which causes most of the slowdown for me because I like running so many things at once that all need a lot of memory :p I find closing anything unnecessary or restarting anything using lots of memory helps best for me (unfortunately that includes firefox, dunno why it eats so much memory after running for a few days straight).

I really need to understand how RAM works, and how people code memory usage in windows programs. Every so often my computer will be down to 0 (or like 5 actually) megs of RAM, and it won't go up, even after the program that sucked out the RAM is done its processes. Isn't RAM cleared after it is used? I learned in my C programming class we need to flush variables or something after every file write. That was a while ago :p