Maintaining your Windows XP computer will help to insure that its performance will not degrade over time. If you don’t maintain your PC and are experiencing issues with speed you can choose to try to resolve the issues yourself or you can take your PC in to a computer professional. While the latter does not require any time on your part it will cost you a considerable amount of money. Many things you can do to resolve speed issues with your computer are free and easy to perform.

More than ninety percent of all problems related to slowness in PCs can be attributed to problems found in the system registry. Microsoft does not provide a tool to scan or fix registry entries but they do provide a registry editing tool. However, unless you really know what you are doing it is not recommended that you manually modify registry entries.

Adding more RAM (random access memory) to your system will almost always help speed up a slow computer and the act of multi-tasking will not bog down the computer as it would with a lower amount of RAM. RAM is hardware that needs to be physically added and tends to be somewhat costly. However if you plan on keeping your system for a while it is an excellent investment.

For faster browsing speed clear your Internet cache (temporary internet files) and delete your cookies. This causes the computer to gain speed on the Internet and the pop-ups from sites that you have been to will also be less frequent.