How to increase system resources?

Everything is glitching, especially firefox. This has never happened until recently, probably the last week or so. Thigns aren't showing up correctly; like right now, this text I'm typing is invisible...really, invisible. I can't see anything but my moving cursor and the little red squiggly mispelling lines.So forgive me if this is very messy.

Scrolling is blurred, images repeated, etc. How do I increase my memory? I don't even have a large number of programs running, and I still have 0.99 GB of RAM.

I think it's system resources becuse I'm constantly getting error messages along the lines of "There is indufficient memoyr to execute this operation" or something likhat.

 

I did all of that a few weeks ago, the startup utilities thing. Definitely helped the initial startup time, though I'm not sure about anything else. And my task manager (which I open just by using ctrl alt dlt, same thing, right?) is not coming up sometimes, like now. I get a "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc000012d). Click on OK to terminate the application. If I try to open it via the bottom windows bar thing, nothing opens at all. I'll try again in a little bit to take a screenshot.

The thing I don't understand is that I haven't been installing any intensive or massive software or anything on the computer in the past week or so. It just seemed to suddenly start doing this. Oh, also, word files won't always save. I get some memory error message when I do that som,etimes, too.

 

I had to close ea bunch of little processes in order to have enoguh memory to paste i into paint. =/

 

Oh, there's my real name. OOH!

 

Edited out1

Note to anyone reading this, do not follow my example and triple post. I'm doing this because 1,) it's a special case, my computer will likely take about 45 minutes to go back and edit and delete posts (hence the reason I am not modding right now), and 2, I'm a mod and therefore am not point spamming, or cash posting or whatever. Anyways, my point is, don't consider this post as making it "okay" to double post. DON'T DOUBLE POST!

 

http://jeeezelouise.wordpress.com/2006/ ... p-the-cpu/

 

I wouldn't think of going completely without a antivirus program, especially since I'm paying $60 a year fro ZA Are there other programs that'll take up less room and do as effective a job?

I turned off the email things and it's taking up much less memory now, around 40k. But still up there.

I also ran a virus scam yesterday and it picked up a virus called win32.backdoor or something along those lines? quarantining/deleting would not work and so I chose to "rename" it. I also unchecked alot of hpxxx processes in start-up utilities.It's definitely running much faster, but the computer's still pretty glitchy.

Is there anything I can buy and install to add more memory or speed?

 

Teehee. This is going to sound horrible and I hate to admit it, but the only reason I'm hesitant to install Linux is because I don't want my friends to come over and be all,

"Hey! Your computer is weird! Why is it different? I've never seen that before!"

and then I'd have to be all, "It's called Linux. I know about it because I am secretly a computer geek."

and then they'd give me the bitchy-teenage-girl look and be all "oh." and stop talking to me.

=(

On the plus side, my computer's running much faster! And I think I'll look into buying more RAM..but isn't 1 GB alot? And don't new CPUs cost alot? =x My CPU is er, "Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00 GHz" according to my, um, computer. Yes. I'm clueless about this sort of thing.