Computer slow? It might not be evil software

Suppose a friend calls you and says, "My computer is running really slowly, especially when I'm browsing the web"..... what's the first thing that pops into your head? Virus? Spyware?

But often, the problem is much simpler than that and much less obvious. When you buy a computer at the store, you would assume that the system has the hardware necessary to run Windows and all your software. But this doesn't always happen.

I took a look at Darlene's computer yet again - she had been complaining that everything is just so slow and I made (a terrible) assumption that her hardware situation was good. But that was a mistake, because when I looked to see how much RAM (memory) was installed in her computer, I looked in horror to see it only reported 256MB of RAM. That is certainly not enough for Windows XP to run very well. And that pretty much explained everything. I ran..... OK, I drove to the store and bought 1GB of RAM ($60) and put it in the PC. That made all the difference. To her, it's a brand new machine now.