Speeding up PC process questions

I was in a chat with an HP tech last night, while most of them have been good so far, I can't say quite the same thing about this one. They were changing their responses and such as we went along and it concerned me a little to try the things suggested. So I wanted to ask and confirm some of the things I was told.

Basically I am trying to get OE and IE to speed up a little, I only have 1gb RAM but will add more eventually, but this is just to make a bit of difference now.

I'm using an HP a1550y


REMOVE UNNECESSARY START UP PROGRAMS

Originally I was told to uncheck all programs except for RECGUARD and KBD. When I confirmed those were the only programs that I needed to have checked, the response changed to, uncheck everything except for these : Alcxmntr, atiptaxx, ati2mdxx, backupnotify, ccapp, ccregvfy, HPBootOp, hpsysdrv, kbd, LTMSG, NvCpl, ps2, recguard, VTTimer, hpcmpmgr.exe.


The tech kept saying if any of the options were not available to skip. So I asked if I was to skip the whole process, or just that program. They then changed their response to "uncheck all programs except your antivirus program"


QUESTION: So my question is, is it best to uncheck all programs, are these programs needed?


INCREASE VIRTUAL MEMORY SIZE:


Said to increase initial value to 2048 and final value to 4096.


Is this OK to do, can it cause any problems?


CLEAR AMOUNT OF TEMPORARY FILES BROWSER USES:

I'm supposed to delete temporary files (including offline content), clear the history, change the security level to the default, clear the SSL state, reset web settings, restor defaults. After they told me what to all do here they said, "connect to internet. If PC stops responding, proceed with the following steps" But never gave me the next step. When I asked, they said that it wouldn't cause any problems.

QUESTION: By changing all of this, what will I all be losing in IE? Will I lose passwords and things like that?

Can doing this cause problems with Internet Explorer? Can I go back in and change things back to fix the problem?


So that is what I was told to do. I'd like to try and increase speed if I can, but I don't want to cause more problems because of poor instructions. My PC isn't that slow, but he recommended doing it to make it perform better.


Thanks for all your help!