Alright, my PC isn't that great. I've had it for quite some time, and it only has 256 MB of RAM. I accept that it's not going to be able to do much very well. But the things it's lagging with the most are things that it was always able to handle before. Watching videos on YouTube or playing a Flash doesn't take a high performance PC...in fact, some PCs with worse specs than mine can do it without problems...I've seen it. My PC is performing like my friend's that was made in 1998 and has less than half the RAM of mine.

I've done virus and spyware scans, and com up with nothing for both. I've checked my processes, and I only have system processes and Firefox running. I have the latest versions of everything, drivers and all. (except Windows itself...I run XP, my PC obviously can't handle Vista.) I defrag regularly.

I could even understand something like updates in the Flash software or YouTube or things like that make it harder to run on slower PCs, but even things that ran fine before like PC games from a CD-ROM are laggy as hell. I mean, surely my computer can handle The Sims, I have 4 times the minimum system requirements for it, and there's no way in hell it should lag when I'm playing 16-bit ROMs. Something is obviously up.

XP barely runs on 256MB RAM, even worse if any of it is shared with your video. If you feel like wiping and reloading, you'll get much better performance out of Windows 2000.

I'm always using over 512mb of RAM when just browsing the web on XP.

2k would be better, definately.

Run 2k as suggested, or get a stripped to the bone version/barely Naked of XP.

How would I actually downgrade to Windows 2000, though? I don't know anywhere I can find a boot disk.

You can't downgrade. You would, for best results, have to format your hard drive and reinstall the OS.

Do you have Oink? If so, here's a link to the ISO, if not, shoot me your email and I can get your an invite. The ISO is bootable, so you don't need a second disk to install the OS.

E: If you do have Oink, here's a light install of XP if that's the way you want to go.

I only have 256 as well and don't have much a problem. The computer does lag a bit but it doesn't bother me much at all. I only have a problem when I run Photoshop or something, but right now I have Opera, EvilLyrics, Winamp, Trillian, and utorrent running and it's fine.

Have you restarted recently?

Have you installed anything new recently? When I installed all the drivers and stuff for my new soundcard on my 512MB XP system I was getting 5 second delays on my clicks and shit and it was because I didn't need to do a full install of all my soundcard stuff. Something in it made it screw with my system and I just had to reinstall the minimum stuff.