extremely SLOW

I have a Dell, 566 cpu, 128 megs of ram, 2gigs HD space used, 16gigs free, running ME that is very slow. Takes 15 minutes to fully boot, during this time hard drive noise is almost non-exsistent. I have start up set so only programs booting at start up are explorer and systray, under performance tab sytem recourses are 93% free. I have replaced ram with an identical 128 meg replacement, makes no difference. When the machine is finally fully booted, you can click on something and it has about a 5 second lag time until the action occurs. I have removed all components inside case, cleaned and checked all devices and cables.
Any ideas or suggestions very much appreciated!
Thanks, Tom

 

With only Explorer and Systray selected as the only startup, I would not rule out spyware/adware just yet.
Here is some free stuff to check your system.
Ad-Aware
SpyBot
AVG AV for free
Regcleaner
You may have to disable System Restore to do any cleaning, if needed.

 

just maybe this'll work...

get a program called rambooster, it helps a lot on slow boot times. also try to disable as many things as possible that u dont need in the system tray.

i forget the site for the prog, but just search: rambooster in google and u should find it.

hope this helps