1. click settings ->control panel ->system ->performance tab
set the swap file to perm at about 300 meg. that will speed up
things some on boot.
2. hunt up Tweakui. its a small program that lets you set things
like menu show delay and several other things that will boost performance.
thats a start for ya. also make sure you have as few things as
possible in startup group. lower vid resolution to 16 bit.
and if the computer has onboard sound turning off lots of unneeded
sounds will also help some. better yet lose the onboard audio and
add a sb live or something. this takes lots of
heavy crap off the processor in games and in windows with system sounds.
and as was already posted install as little programs as you must
the bigger the registry the slower it gets lol..
and if you use norton utilities run win doctor it will clean out
useless missing crap in registry. if no norton search for another
program to do it there are several out there. im a norton guy myself.
myself in last 15 years or so have spent lots of time trying to get
winblows of all versions to run slicker lol. like win95a on a 486 it
works but man ya have to really whack out stuff.
this box im on now is about the same as yours.
celeron 733 - 390 meg and 30 gig and 15 gig drives. and it had onboard
vid and sound. the onboard vid is fine but damn that onboard sound. i
added the sb live and bang it helped 50% lol. on a fresh boot it has
91% resources free running tiny personal firewall and several other
resource hogs on startup.
also lots of the stuff we really need now days like firewalls and
virus protection has a habit of being bloatware. myself im into using
older versions of stuff like the firewall and virus protection. i use
older norton 2002 and older firewall.
and to help tell whats going on on your box. look at pc advisor at
this page
http://www.belarc.com its a freeware that lists whats
installed and lots of other interesting data about the system and
running processes.
good luck and happy tweaking man. there is 100s of sites out there
that gives ya ideas. this being one of the best is ya look around some.