Okay, I'm officially angry.

[Sylvie]

Yeah, okay heres the problem. My laptop has 504 MB of RAM. That should work fine for some older games, right?

Well, apparently it isn't.

I tried everything.

Cleaning out ALL spyware: FAILED.
Defrag: FAILED
Upgrade Windows: FAILED
Upgrade Video Card: FAILED
Search for virus: (had none) FAILED
Closing everything when I play the game: FAILED.

Nothing works. Nothing. Its mainly a problem for Gametap, and Java browser programs. (Like in the EoFF IRC, for example) Gametap works fine for my dad's computer, and the only difference is that his computer has 1GB of RAM. Does ANYONE have ANY solutions to this?? The game lags about every 2-4 minutes, and its a pain in my ass. Please help.

[Xaven]

Ctrl + Alt + Delete, then go to the Processes tab, and make sure you close (End / End Tree) everything that's un-needed for windows to run correctly. (That includes everything with capital letters.) :D There's so much crap running on most people's compy's and they don't even know it.

[Silent Warrior]

I realise that you shouldn't disable your resident virus-protection whenever, but perhaps you should try that now and see what happens? To my knowledge, I haven't had a significant performance-drop with AVast active, but most people on gaming-forums suggest deactivating resident virus-scanners (and make sure you're not connected to the internet) when it's at all mentioned.
If you're considered an 'advanced' user, you might make some progress by having a look at your registry. Needless to say, be careful in there if you try this.

[Flying Mullet]

Ctrl + Alt + Delete, then go to the Processes tab, and make sure you close (End / End Tree) everything that's un-needed for windows to run correctly. (That includes everything with capital letters.) There's so much crap running on most people's compy's and they don't even know it.

This is probably your best bet. Once you get your computer down to the core processes, run your virus scan, then spyware, then defrag, etc... It is very possible that you have a virus that prevents your computer from updating, or a conflict in programs or spyware is causing your computer to act up. By closing all unnecessary processes you're giving your computer a better chance to clean itself up as there is less of a chance of other programs and such interfering.