slow performance

Hi,
See what I said to Nelson (above you) ... seems like we
are all in the same boat !!

-----Original Message-----
Ηi. Ive got a compaq presario notebook and my system
seems slow or at least i think so (im not sure because
its my first notebook, first time i use windows xp) and
i would like to know if this is normal. i have windows xp
home edition, Pentium 4 cpu 2.53 GHz, 512MB ram (of which
64MB goes to the display adapter) and i have done
everything i could to increase performance (adjustments
in visual effects for better performance, not many
programms in start up, defragment of disk every month
etc) but the results are not ...... The thing that makes
me wonder is that my old desktop Pc which was celeron 1.2
GHz with 512MB ram and windows 98SE was much much
faster! Is this due to the speed of disk which is 4200
(desktop had 5500) or anything else? Are there any ways
that i can increase performance considerably (for
example, should i increase the paging file size which is
672MB, or should i disable some services that run in
windows) or anything else? In addition, although i have
447MB of ram, when i logon and without opening any
program, i open the task manager and in performance it
says that the available physical memory is only 265MB!!
Where did 180mb go?? Thank you very much and please
forgive my language errors/ im not an american!
.