Hi everyone,
I have recently acquired an old 1.2ghz Pentuim III pc it has 512mb of ram for £12.50. I intend to give the computer to my uncle who only needs a computer for browsing the internet and he has only ever used a computer for his work (rarely). So I go about putting windows xp on the machine and after 2 days (joke! just seemed like it) of installing updates and security the machine was ready to roll.
Aswell as all the MS updates I have installed Commodo Firewall, AVG 8 free edition and Ccleaner, I also put Skype on it so he can get in touch if he has any issues. So I fire it up to test on the internet and the thing is slow, real slow, painfully slow, far slower than it should be, I check task manager and iexplore.exe is using close to 100% cpu. Now I know this shouldn't be the case and have experienced IE running smoothly on slower machines, can anyone suggest something I could do to speed things up abit, I've only just installed the OS so I doubt it is nastyware etc. and a scan with AVG says its clean.
I would like to stick with IE7 because of compatibility for a inexperienced user although if someone can suggest a low resource browser I'm willing to give it a try, although I really don't think this is whats happening here.
I appreciate any help suggested thanks,

A good start is if you can bump up the Ram to lets say 1gig, Then the processor won't have to work as hard. Another thing to speed up IE7 can be found here
How To Make Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) Faster | Tech Tips Now

Another thing you can do is go into your system settings and up the swap space.
It will help speed it up a tad.

And if you really don't need IE may I suggest you try another browser like Firefox or possibly Opera?
The are both a bit more secure and lightweight compared to IE.

Just a thought.

You did not mention any video card. If that computer is using on-board graphics then bumping up the RAM to 1 Gb will help a lot. Then I recommend dropping in a PCI graphics card. Even the most budget card will most likely offer significant performance boost as a card will free up previously stolen RAM used for on-board graphics, and the CPU is able to hand off more of the graphics crunching to dedicated cards. I would not worry about another browser at this time - since IE is in integral part of Windows, it needs to be fixed. Then if you want, you can look at alternative browsers. That said, security is not a reason if you otherwise keep the system updated, and protected with a suitable arsenal of anti-malware tools, such as those you have assembled.

With only 512Mb or less of RAM, you need a decent size PF. The old rule of thumb of 1.5 x RAM is not enough with only 512Mb and I recommend a setting of 1024 for both initial and maximum, unless you have plenty of free disk space, then you can just let Windows manage it.

Hi friends and thanks for all the interesting and helpful advice so far,
The max ram the system can have is 512mb although like I said I've used IE7 on slower systems and it runs ok, well better than this anyway, I am using onboard graphics I may try to get an old PCI gcard, anyhow as that may help overall.
Further research led me to try IE7 with no add ons, (for people who want to try this in XP go to : start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Internet Explorer (no add-ons)) which ran fine until I visited eBay. Then it started behaving like before, very slow! I then tried Youtube and the same, slow response, scrolling etc. so it must be sites with Flash content, does anyone know a way to increase flash player 10's performance or something else I can do to improve flash video playback, I really don't know understand why this is a problem and I believe the specs of this machine should handle these web apps no probs?
Ok guys, thanks so far and I look forward to more replies!

I saw Flash 10 fixes for Windows during my Google search for the same problem in Linux.
Check Google and there you will find plenty of articles about the IE Flash problem.

The fix for my issue had to do with the fact that Linux already had a open source flash plugin installed and was fighting with the Adobe version.
LOL!!

So all I had to do was uninstall the open sourced version and all was well.

And as was posted earlier, a $20 video card can do wonders for performance on an older system with integrated video.

does anyone know a way to increase flash player 10's performance or something else I can do to improve flash video playback, I really don't know understand why this is a problem and I believe the specs of this machine should handle these web apps no probs?

I don't agree with your assessment and think you should not dink with anything until you get a graphics card. Today's computing tasks, even simple web surfing is immensely more graphics intensive than it was 10 years ago (that CPU came out in Feb 1999, the motherboard likely earlier).

Any PCI card will significantly improve overall performance. The GPU will be more powerful than what is built on the motherboard, it will have it's own RAM tweaked for graphics processing, and it will free up the significant chunk of system RAM currently snagged for the on-board GPU. Understand that, in turn, gives Windows and the CPU more RAM to stash data in instead of having to use the already overworked page file on the slllooowww (and perhaps crowded) hard drive as much.

I note NewEgg has several decent 256Mb PCI cards for under $50US.

Originally Posted by Digerati

I don't agree with your assessment and think you should not dink with anything until you get a graphics card. Today's computing tasks, even simple web surfing is immensely more graphics intensive than it was 10 years ago (that CPU came out in Feb 1999, the motherboard likely earlier).

Any PCI card will significantly improve overall performance. The GPU will be more powerful than what is built on the motherboard, it will have it's own RAM tweaked for graphics processing, and it will free up the significant chunk of system RAM currently snagged for the on-board GPU. Understand that, in turn, gives Windows and the CPU more RAM to stash data in instead of having to use the already overworked page file on the slllooowww (and perhaps crowded) hard drive as much.

I note NewEgg has several decent 256Mb PCI cards for under $50US.

Firstly thanks to everyone for their useful advice, ok so I'm looking for a PCI gcard on ebay and find an auction selling a ATI Rage 2mb PCI gcard along with a SoundBlaster Live CT4760 PCI soundcard going for next to nothing, will this help? Or will the low spec of the card be next to useless?

Here is a link to the auction if it helps

If you say any card would be an improvement and if I could fit the sound card aswell would that also take some pressure off the CPU?

...just as a footnote, I disabled the 'enable hardware acceleration' option on the flash player and this has help alot, for anyone who needs to know how to do this, right click on the flash player in your browser select settings and untick the 'enable hardware acceleration' option.

Anyone know if the above gcard and soundcard would help or hinder?

2Mb? No, that would be no good. You caught me with that one. I expected any card you could find would have at the very least, 32Mb. Your current on-board is probably using at least 8mb, perhaps 32Mb or more. I would recommend you get no less than a 64Mb PCI card. 128 would be better, and 256Mb will likely be the most you can find in PCI. Following your link above, enter the following to see your options:

PCI 256Mb DDR
then
PCI 128Mb DDR

Sound cards are another issue. On board sound is generally not a big deal, as far as consuming resources. If the on-board sound works, I would use that, and 1/2 way decent speakers.

Also note that every time you add hardware, you increase the load on the PSU, which I suspect is rated to barely meet the needs of that computer when it was new, before any extra hardware was added.