Slowness in XP Pro

I recently purchased a Dell with XP Pro, a 3.06 GHZ processor, 1 GB RAM, and 160GB hard drive. In surfing, it seems quite sluggish at times, and slower than my old Win 98 computer. I have virtually nothing in it program wise except what it came with. Frankly, I quite disapointed. It came with Mcafee, which I delete (all that I could), and installed Sygate firewall, Spybot, Ad-Aware, AVG, Spyguard, Spywareblaster, and CCleaner. Also, I turned off the MS firewall. I was looking at a friend's system, which also has XP Pro and much less horsepower and flies compared to mine. Am I missing something which would speed it up.

 

This is a common thing with new pc's, they load so much junk on them from the factory. xp pro has no bearing on this, there is programs accessing the internet as you are trying to surf, things like update managers, game sites ,possibly driver update programs, just things that you dont really need,ccleaner has a startup program built in where you can stop these programs from starting up,I choose to disable all update programs, printers, office,anything i can start from a shortcut when i need it, if you think you screwed up with the program, just uninstall it and everything will go back to default.For the startup manager go to tools startup. ed
http://www.majorgeeks.com/CCleaner_Slim_No_Yahoo_Toolbar_English_d4191.html

 

I've pretty much cleaned up my start up items and it hasn't helped.

 

Internet!

 

TimW, thanks for the help once again, but I can't find the IE section you're referring to.

 

Thanks for the help, but I'm a little concerned about having to add drivers as this is a new computer/system and I just don't think it should have to have such software added to make it operate properly. Something is amiss to make it run this slowly.

 

I just gave that a try but it didn' seem to help.

 

No virus items, TimW, just 3 spyware items. As noted, I have AVG installed.