OS vs. Performance Issues

I need some tips on how to maintain/improve my comp's performance at a tolerable level.

The specs are in the sig, so that's that for them. I've considered trying Win2k again, hoping it might perform better on this Dell, but you never really know, XP has performed even better than 2k on some machines, and is more stabile.

Why not continue using XP? It's not a bad operating system, but I've used Server 2003 as a desktop OS and it performed significantly better. I'm running XP Pro, I've all the updates, I run Norton's Antivirus and firewall apps to try and keep the system secure, use AdAware regularly, defrag the drives, etc. I need a LOT of apps installed on the computer, though, and I think this is what eventually slows the system down. I really am not sure how to go about avoiding this, since not installing those apps for use is out of the question.

I've a new HD coming to me in a few days and will be reinstalling the works, once again, but this time I wanted to think ahead and consider the option of installing several operating systems on the machine, perhaps each for a different purpose? I play games that take up a lot of space and eat up a lot of RAM, but I also do a lot of multimedia authoring which does the same, and in order to do the latter I need to remove as many unnecessary processes as I can to make sure nothing messes with encoding, capturing and other 'fragile' jobs the apps perform.

I am always amazed by people who claim that they have no performance problems whatsoever with their machines. There must be something they are doing that I am not, or vice versa.

I could use more RAM, for sure, but I don't know how big of a difference another 512 mb would make.

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If you're going to be using things like multimedia apps, and you want encoding to be flawless I'd downgrade to 2000 on that machine. XP will run perfectly well on a 1.6 gigahertz machine, but sometimes you might get glitches in encoding, especially if you have more than one program running at once.
512 mb would help your system out alot, but you still might experience occasional glitches in the system.

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It all depends on the hardware. Dell usually has stripped down boards with less features and low end models of each CPU class. Your RAM is low and slow. Depending on the game, your CPU is having to use up more of it's resourced to decode audio in games. If you had a good sound card, most games use the sound card processor. Doom III uses the CPU though.

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XP ran slow on my 2.53GHz dell too. I downgraded to 2000 and it runs faster and games perform better. Upgrading RAM from 256MB to 768MB helped XP some but games still lagged a bit so I bought a copy of 2k. Win2003 has a lighter GUI and alot of serivces are disabled by default so it would be a little faster. I also notice that Win2K doesn't slow down as much when new programs are installed as compared to XP.

Hope I helped a little