what can i do to enhance system performance?

stop using anything microsoft !!

Software (periodical tasks): uninstall all the apps that you never used or never will, delete the content of your windows temp directory and Internet Explorer's (if you use it), after all of these run a disk defrag. Additionaly, you should set your swap file size to a fixed value and use a registry cleaner but very carefully.

Hardware: a big RAM (no matter the latency) and a fast HDD (no matter the size). The CPU speed equals nothing if you don't have those.

I like jv16. It's a darn good registery cleaner + other tools. http://www.jv16.org/

Another thing that I have had to do over the last two days is to delete (rename really) my local computer account in c:\Documents and Settings\username. This forced windows to createa a new one. You have to set all your properties back up again, but it's much quicker after that cleanup.

Yeah, I have to agree about winpoop... try Ubuntu!.... But, if you can edit your post and provide us with your operating system info, myself or others can be more helpful. There are some real quick things you can do to dramitically speed up winxp for instance that dont apply to anything else.

try ccleaner , its free and it allow you to make a backup before using its registry cleaner section, so its easy to fix if you get rid of something by mistake. Really easy to use too

http://www.ccleaner.com/

When I want to speed up my PC I do many different things which would take too long to explain in this answer. I recomment PC World's Tweeks, go to: http://msn.pcworld.com/article/id,119267-page,1/ar...

Upgrade ur cpu's ram to about 2gig should be able to run almost anything smoothly.