Some Things You Can Do...

Some people have tried to give answers, but they've only hit a few things. I have a Sony VAIO laptap, 850 MHz w/ 20 GB hard drive. Here are some things I would recommend:

1. Memory upgrade. A memory upgrade is one of the cheapest things you can do. Don't buy fast memory unless your computer can support it. If you put fast memory into a slow CPU bus, it will perform the same as memory matched to your CPU bus and you will have wasted your money. I would go up to 512 MB. Make sure you know what kind of memory to get, and then buy it cheap on ebay or check pricegrabber.com or frugal goole and others.

2. Scan for memory resident programs that install at startup and get rid of them. You can run a scan online at PCPitstop.com. They will run diagnostics on your computer and make recommendations based on what they found. Under the Windows section in the results, they will tell you all the processes that are running, which ones are needed, and which ones you would get better performance from by not having them start until you need them.

3. Scan for viruses and spyware. Others have suggested reformatting your hard drive. This is a long and time consuming way to get rid of spyware. A better way is to download SpyBot search and destroy from http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html. It is free and will detect and remove spyware. It also has a tool for controlling which programs run at startup. You can get free antivirus software from Avast at http://www.avast.com.

4. Turn off any fancy feature settings in Windows that give special effects - such as fading and shadowing. From Windows XP, you do this by right clicking on ''my computer'', select ''properties'', click the ''advanced'' tab, then click the ''settings'' button under ''performance''. You can de-select many special effects that eat up processor time. I usually leave only the ''smooth edges of screen fonts'' active.

5. As others have suggested, defragment your hard drive regularly. Another trick is re-partition your hard drive into two drives, C: and D:. Make the D: partition just big enough for your windows swap file (virtual memory) times two. For instance, I use a 1.5 GB swap file on a 3 GB partition. This keeps the swap file from causing your main drive C: from getting fragmented very quickly. The swap file can be managed by following the exact same steps in 4. above but then selecting the ''advanced'' tab and then the ''change'' button under the ''virtual memory'' section. You can tell what size you want for the paging file and where you want it to be. You can use partition magic (not free) to do this without having to reformat your whole hard disk.

6. Run PCPitstop.com to find out how fast your hard disk is. If it is slower than 20 MB/s, then you can get an external USB hard disk that is 20 MB/s, which is faster than your internal disk. By getting and external disk, you can keep it when you do upgrade to a new computer. My old VAIO actually has USB 1.01, which is only 1.5 MB/s. I added an external firewire hard disk and I get 18 MB/s. My internal hard disk is 13 MB/s.

7. PCPitstop has a nice little software package for a modest price called PC optimize that will check your registry and make tweaks that can improve your internet connection and computer's performance.

So, here are 7 easy things you can do for very little extra cost. I still use my VAIO 850 MHz as a nice little email, internet browsing, word processing, photo editing, and light use machine. It's not powerful enough to edit video or for gaming, but it's still very useful.