I agree with the idea of trying a fresh install of XP SP4 before spending any money. I would think that a SSD boot drive would be better investment for speed.

Nothing wrong with an emachines. They are a decent, cheap, no-frills PC. If it has 1GB of RAM, we can safely assume that it's been ticking along for 5 years or more.

They are pretty junk. It probably has a celeron, in which case memory is probably not bottlenecking him.

If the computer wasn't always like this, it is NOT the memory.

Web browser memory requirements have grown over time. Having such a small amount of memory causes the OS to use Virtual Memory, or "Swap space" which will slow the machine noticeably, due to the fact that the working set of data must be saved to HDD from RAM and swapped out constantly. If the machine frequently seems to pause while the HDD runs, you're out of physical RAM. While adding an SSD is definitely going to speed things up, it should probably be done only after adding more RAM. Furthermore, such an old machine cannot take full advantage of a new SSD.

Really? What makes you say that? You think the machine worked fine for five years, and then sort of almost broke but not quite?

I was basing my thoughts on the OP's description of the problem, ie. that replay of downloaded video files weren't smooth. If the PC can connect SATA drives, why wouldn't an SSD improve throughput, including start up and file streaming? Further, even if the system was going to VM on the drive, an SSD should be faster than going to a platter and head device.

Adding an SSD would improve speed. But it would also mask the problem of lacking RAM (Virtual Memory thrashing). An SSD that was constantly being written to, as in the case described, would suffer an early death as well.

This is what I'm thinking. I had a laptop that was running slowly and with glitchy video. I just took the vacuum and cleaned the CPU heat sink and it was like magic.

Also, make sure you have at least 20% free on the hard drive. Defrag and disk clean up too.

I would not suggest removing any heat sinks, it's unnecessary, and it's an opportunity to make a costly mistake if you aren't careful during reassembly.

Going back to the old PC system days . . . has anyone ever noticed any appreciable "speed" improvment after defragmenting a drive?

Must be me. I've been doing it since PC -XT and AT days . . . and never noticed a difference. ;)

more ram won't help if your processor is slow.For a business I would up grade to a newer model

Agreed. The defrag never made one iota of difference in speed.

The best thing I have ever done for speed (this is a four year old XP) is to switch to the Chromium browser, as recommended to me by folks on this forum.

For reasons that I cannot define, this browser does not slow the machine down after it has been used for one week. Both Firefox and Chrome will suck up nearly 1GB after some extensive use. Chromium doesn't appear to do the same. Chromium is a bit unstable and crashes if you load up a couple of tasks at once. However, it knows that it crashed and it recovers from the crash in about three seconds and reloads all the tabs in less than 10 seconds. I'm quite pleased with it.

? You think the machine ran fine for 5 years, then all of a sudden needs more memory?

If the machine was running fine a few years ago, and only just recently started to bog down and become choppy, its not a memory issue. Adding another gig of memory might help (i was always fine with 1-2 gb of ram on XP) but i still advocate doing a reinstall of windows if it hasnt ever been done.

On defragging, i never noticed much difference. Maybe on extremely slow machines. But with SSDs its best to disable defrag nowadays.

In case anyone is curious, one reason a browser needs more memory now than it did five years ago, has more to do with the internet than it does the browser. Websites put more content on a page, including persistent Flash tracking software, which can continue to run even after you've gone to another website.