TeamBundy: My notebook has 512 MB RAM too and it's hardly enough these times. With all patches from the Windows Update server I guess the RAM is more and more occupied by the system components and the freezes caused by the swapping process happen more often.
That's why I want to purchase a new notebook with 2 GB RAM as soon as possible.

Fencer:My PC has 2GB of RAM and runs on a 3200 Pentium 4 processor.  But I have these 'freezes' too.

Fencer: I just found that there were two "java updates" (J2SE Runtime environment 5.0 Update 6 and Update 8) installed on my PC (actually, also a notebook :) ), plus a third thing called "java 2 runtime environment SE v.1.4.2_03". I uninstalled the "Update 6" (maybe there was a conflict), but nothing happened (nothing good or bad... which appears to make the update 6 unnecessary!). Do you also have these freezes or do you just want to buy a 2GB RAM new one? Because if you don't have them, I'm sure you can give us some good advice (other than reinstalling everything ) on what we could do to have more memory or what we could check! :-)

TeamBundy: Sometimes you will be surprised on what is ran when a PC starts up (and continues to run in the background)

I use a program called StartupRun - http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/strun.html

It shows everything that starts at PC startup. (When I install a new PC for a user, I even run this). Things like Adobe has things running at startup to speed up their product (but if you rarely use their product, no point having it run in the background - just take the extra 2 seconds later when you do actually start the program).

Anyway, this program allows you to right click, and "disable" something from starting - Of course I guess I should also warn if you don't know what something is - it either means it might be very important where you don't want to touch it - or some kind of spyware messing things up. So be carefull when using it.

Oh, and more memory will always help. 512MB is not much anymore - if you can upgrade it at all - even to 1 GB, you will find it helping a lot.

BIG BAD WOLF: thank you very much for the link and information! I'll download it and check out what is going with the PC. I'll do it within tonight and tomorrow: there is another debugging to be done here at home that has at the moment higher priority (laundry )

Is there a way to say what programs still have left stuff in the registry that may be slowing the pc down (other than spyware)? The reason is that I feel that I haven't installed too many new things on my PC and it did run smoothly for most of the time before recently (maybe a month or two ago).

TeamBundy: Another thing which will make a PC "freeze" for short time is if your hard drive is fragmented a lot - so a good defrag always helps.

(For those that don't know - if a hard disk is not defraged, pices of data on the hard drive can be split up in many parts - which takes longer for the PC to read - which in turn, slows things down and can cause "freezes" when the PC can't get it's information fast enough)

TeamBundy:
This here http://www.iolo.com/sm/ads/landing/index.cfm?pid=445F2C56-41B2-449B-8E15-F880DD92137D
will do lots for you.   I been using System mechanic for yrs and love it.   U can check your registry with this also.

TeamBundy: I had the same problem with one of my pc's a few years ago , i tried everything to cure it , when we left dial up and joined broadband the freezing stopped and still has no problems to this day , if i went back to dial up im sure it would start playing up again . Not sure if you are on broadband or dial up though .

Jason, BBW, Baked Alaskan: Thanks for the tips and help. I've fixed the registry problems (through Registry Doctor), and it was a mess.. but still the screen freezes so that was not the problem. I'm login to the internet through a putty-tunneling-connection, I am thinking that may be the case (but otherwise, my LAN seemed to be down ever so often and have been lazy to set it back - i guess I'll have to give that a try also!).

Registry Mechanic, small programm that fixes some problems and asks for registration to fix the remaining ones. Good thing is that it identifies the exact location, so that you can fix them manually later on. For anybody interested in such things! :-)

TeamBundy: I don't think it would be influenced by the Java updates.