Frozen all Over

First off, i am confused. i bought a Intel Celeron D356
3.33 GHz 512 KB L2 cache
533 MHz FSB
512 MB DDR SDRAM
Media Center Edition 2005
This was purchased in Dec 2006
It crashed from a virus in Sept 2007. I took it to a computer repair, along with my e-machine back-up disc.
I am quite sure I did not get home with the same thing.
What the repair people installed was Intel Celeron 3.33 GHz
368 MB Ram
Windows XP Professional Version 2002
Service Pack 3
I realize there is nothing I can do now, but my virtual memory keeps coming up low. I did adjust the paging file to 768 initial size
1148 max
Not that I know what I am doing, but read several articles on ram and paging files. this has seemed to speed up the "puter"
but will just close when in internet explorer 7 I have had 7 for over a year and no problems. When i play games the screen becomes jumpy and the game stops in midstream. you can hear the fan running loudly on the computer (like it might be trying to reboot) The computer has also frozen up a couple of times. When on internet, mail games, just about everywhere. Task manager could not end programs, in fact one time could not pull up task manager I have to manually turn off power.. I love my "puter" and love to learn about the operations and behind the screen action. I certainly do not want to ruin or even think that I can fix or go deep into system. I admire the people that can. Is their anything you can tell me that I could do to improve perfomance and stability.. Allso. I ran a scan from Runscanner, then chose ya'll to help.
What do I do with the scan results?
Oh, I also went in and disbled allot of the programs running in the background that was not needed. Like networking, fax etc.

 

Welcome to MajorGeeks! I would recommend getting more RAM. 1Gb would be very nice for your setup. Get this program: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4387.html (it is free!) And see how much and what kind of RAM your computer needs. This might help as well: http://www.crucial.com/index.aspx?g...16823:vnmkqnbklcyaafu4zrgaaaab:20081019025557

 

Fred's right. Adding memory is the quickest, easiest, and most cost effective hardware upgrade you can do to increase performance. Memory is so cheap now, it's almost a joke. 1gb of DDR2 is only about $25. Regular DDR (also called 'DDR one' by many people) is only a little more, like maybe $35 for 1gb. So, adding more RAM, changing your page file appropriately for the upgrade, and then keeping up with regular maintenance all combined will speed up your PC nicely. As to the lock ups.... many things can cause a PC to lock up: lack of RAM, bad hard drive, corrupt system files, malware, an over-abundance of junk files, too many programs running at start up, Norton/McAfee, extreme drive fragmentation (I just had a drive I had to defrag with FIVE different defrag programs to get it somewhat back to normal; it really needed to be formatted but it wasn't my call to make; it had NEVER been defragged in 6 years), and any combination of these things and others can cause problems. How about inside the case? Are the fans clean? If you're gaming, do you have a good video card? Is the fan on it clean? Now that I've completely discouraged you ( sorry rolleyes ) here's a good guide to basic system maintenance:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=106650

 

Ya'll are simply amazing Thanks allot

 

And dlb knocks it out of the park again. Good post dlb. :-D