[bluesoul]

Originally Posted by Smoothie

Solution. Delete your OS, esp if it's winblows.

No, that's not a solution. That's...well, unhelpful.

Anyway, while you're in the task manager doing what bashy said, an easy way to see what's using a lot of resources is to sort the process by CPU %. You'll be surprised at what can be eating your cycles alive. Firefox in particular is sadly notorious for being a resource hog, among other programs. Other than that, bashy gave you a good set of things to look at, especially your startup list in msconfig.

Also, if you're using Vista these days...1GB is the lower limit; I'm running a gig of RAM and actually ran OUT of memory last week for the first time since I was on Windows 98 with 128MB. I'm not sure if it's just poorly implemented right now or what; I'd really like to see a service pack soon to address some irritating things.