1. Buy an additional hard drive and dedicate it to your paging file. The paging file is a file on your hard disk that is used when you have no more RAM available to run applications. Windows creates a paging file on your hard drive that simulates RAM. This can cause big slow downs on your system because the same disk that your computer is accessing for files is trying to write to the page file. When you dedicate a separate drive this disk access can happen simultaneously. You should not need anything more than about 20-40GB. You can find those on E-Bay or a used computer store for next to nothing. The article below will help you move the paging file once you have installed and formatted your additional hard drive:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886/

2. Double the RAM installed in your computer. This is, by far, the easiest way to drastically increase the performance of your computer. Many benchmarks have been performed indicating that increasing the RAM in your computer doesn