You really must defrag your hard drive on a regular basis. When you use your hard drive a lot, the information on the drive becomes fragmented, or scattered. That means your computer needs to hunt all over the drive for the pieces of information. That translates to performance problems. Defragmentation isn't a "forever fix." If you use your computer more, you continue to fragment the information, so yes, you need to defrag some more! ***** You want to have your virus checker running in the background all the time. You need to be looking for viruses. My computer automatically checks for email every few hours... Norton Antivirus has caught and killed a few viruses that way. ***** Concerning the memory: we only know what we're told. If someone doesn't give all the facts up front, then they're liable to get some recommendations that aren't appropriate to that particular situation. We have two choices: 1.) Refuse to make any suggestions till we have more information. 2.) Give what is usually good advice and see if it applies. I chose #1 this time. I stand by that choice. Now that we have some more info, all I can do is ask for more. *** Psychoduck: you should be able to find out definitely how much memory your computer can handle. Look for the motherboard or computer manual, or visit the web site of the company that made the motherboard or computer. In some cases, you need to look "at the big picture." My computer has 2 slots for SDRAM. The total capacity for memory is 512MB. At the time I got it, 512MB of RAM was outrageously expensive. I filled up the memory slots with what I could afford. Then it was time to upgrade the memory. I took out my motherboard manual, and did some calculations. I removed a 64MB SDRAM, and gave it to my wife. That doubled her memory, and I got a 256MB SDRAM. Then I bought another 256MB, and removed the other 64MB. You might end up "retiring" some memory to make room for more memory. Or if you have another computer, you might be able to reuse the old memory that way. Ron