For a start, you're running two Anti Viruses. Running two will cause conflict, slowing your PC down and compromising the effectiveness of the Anti Viruses. Get rid of one of them.
Also check your FF add ons for Ask Bar, it has been known to really affect FF. If after doing this your FF is still slow, disable all your add ons, and then enable them one at a time to find out if any are causing the slow down.
They are both OK Derek, if anything, adblock plus should actually speed up your browsing. It stops ads from showing on certain web pages, thus speeding up it's load time.
Have you ran a malwarebytes and AVG scan recently? to check for problems. Also, how many programmes do you have running?
OK, at least you're running XP with it and not Vista.
My only suggestion to get it faster would be to double the RAM you have, to 1GB. Buying from somewhere like crucial.com (they can do a free system scan to tell you want you need), should cost no more than �20 and you should see the difference. It's not too hard to fit the RAM, but does involve taking the case off your PC so you may prefer to get someone with a bit of knowledge in this area to help.
Thanks, fo3nix. I don't have a problem with opening the case- I've just slotted in a hi-speed USB2 card and that was quite straightforward. Presumably upping the RAM as you suggest would be similar ?
Yea it's easy. Goto crucial.com/uk and scan your system. This will tell you exactly the RAM you need to buy. You don't have to buy from crucial but they are a good brand, if a touch expensive. Just make sure you get the right type.
You'll probably have two RAM slots available. One might be used, or perhaps both. Generally it's good to get two RAM modules, of the same kind.
Just make sure you push them in properly. If they're a bit loose your system probably won't start up.
I have been a fan of Firefox for quite some time - anything to get away from MS IE! But I discovered recently that the latest version of Firefox is both slow to load, slow in execution and grabs a large portion of the PC memory to run itself in. So then I tried Google Chrome - almost instant loading, very fast in use, minimal screen furniture - best browser to date.