Thank you, Grandpa.

I run the Windows disk defragmenter every Wednesday morning at 4:00 a.m., and disk cleanup every Tuesday at the same time. Should I schedule them every night, do you think?

I already have AdAware, and I run it manually about every two weeks. The first time I ran it, I got rid of surprisingly few files, and it's been very rare for anything to turn up since then. I'm pretty careful about what I let onto my computer.

The only programs I have running all the time are NetNanny (which I usually have disabled), Norton AntiVirus 2003, Kodak EasyShare, and Adaptec CreateCD. I'm not sure why the latter two are always running, as I don't have shortcuts to them in my Startup folder. Stopping them has no noticeable effect on system speed.

My memory usage is a bit puzzling. I only have 128MB of memory, yet the system memory monitor tool shows an average of 250MB allocated! Processor usage is typically around 10%, except when a program is loading, then it jumps briefly to about 80%. I've noticed that if I have a DOS prompt window open, and I run anything at all in it, processor usage jumps to 100% and stays there. If the window is open but I'm not running a program, processor usage stays around 10%.

I gained 1.8 GB of free space on my C: drive by moving my photos to the D: drive, and since then the system is noticeably faster. In fact, it's much faster. I haven't had a chance to try running LimeWire yet, but I'll let you know how it works out.

Thanks again to everybody for all the help.