Okay for part two I am going to concentrate on the speed up options, mostly for the win7 and vista users.

The first thing I like to do is turn off the windows search indexing. Can't really say why it slows the system down but it does. So here are the steps. click on the start menu button, type, services.msc, that opes a different window, scroll down to, windows search and stop the service, the highlight it and right click for properties and disable it. On to the next step

Close all open windows. This step is much debated but I assure you it will in almost all cases help your boot speed. click on the start menu, type, msconfig, don't get nervous this is childs play if you can follow instructions. This opens a new window with tabs across the top, select the boot tab, the click advanced, top left check the number of processors box, now if you have a dual core or quad core processor it will give you two or four and the tip here is to select the highest number given, the click the okay or apply and reboot if needs be. on to step three.

Once again close all windows that you can. Now click on the start menu, highlight, computer and right click then select properties. on the new window select and click, Advanced system settings, make sure the advanced tab is the open one, now click on performance, for visual effects select best performance, by clicking on the radio button,now click the advanced tab, and you will see the options for virtual memory,click on the change box, at the very top of the next window un-check the automatic page file setting, highlight drive C: then look at the bottom of the box, there should be a recommended page file size, highlight the custom button, then type the same number of MB into both boxes, click on the set button, then okay, the system my ask for a reboot, if it does do it now.

Now this last tip is another one of those much debated tips, so all I will say it that it has worked well for me. the example I will use is my 16gb Sandisk thumb drive, or memory stick, call it what you will. when you plug one into your win7 or vista OS computer it will give you the options to use this to speed up my computer.(ie) readyboost. Here's the catch, by default it will only use 4069mb of that 16gb stick. That's not a lot of help in a manner of speaking. So, and this is what I do, I format the drive in the NTSF format, most all memory stick are in fat32 from the factory. After the format readyboost will use all of the 16gb save maybe 5 or 6mb.

at this point if you have followed the steps I have outlined, you should be seeing some real speed and overall performance even if you have a low memory system. So last but not least I will offer this option. My oldest laptop was bought in 2007, so in computer terms it is well past being old. Since it had a dual core AMD processor and was top notch in it's day I have kept it up and have win7 on it now for the OS. I did however go to OEMPCworld and order more memory for it. It's made by HP so I was able to get the same type or make of RAM that HP used when it was new. The system maxed out @ 4gb and that was what I got at a very low price.The people at OEMPC were great to work with and I got the RAM next day via fedex. The shipping cost more than the RAM, so take the hint.

Best wishes to all and Happy computing.