Some very good advice here. I ran the PCPitstop tests which gave my laptop a clean bill of health ( just a few minor issues which I pretty much knew anyway). Then downloaded the XP Tweakguide, and had a quick read through some of the memory and performance sections. I increased the pagefile to 2560Mb, disabled the Indexing Service, and reduced the System Restore memory usage from 14% to 2% - that got me back nearly 4GB alone! It's made a considerable improvement to an otherwise fairly basic spec machine. I will spend a bit more time reading the whole guide, I am getting a better understanding of what goes on inside a P.C. now.
Thanks to all. TFP.
Last edited by The Flying Pram; 1st January 2008 at 17:05.