system speed up!!

Turning off antivirus software may help a little bit. It uses a lot of system resources. Your best bet though would be to add another 64 MB of RAM. It's cheap and will give your system a boost.

How long has the operating system been running?
Over time, Windows builds up "registry" bloat.

If you have had the OS running for 2 years or more, formating the hard drive and re-installing everything will give you a noticable boost in performance. BACK UP EVERYTHING FIRST!
Some peers recommend wiping the hard drive and starting over fresh every 6 months.

Other "software" ways to speed things up;
Reduce the number of background applications that are running.
Disable every applicationin the system tray that is not "critical" to your needs.
If you have W98, run msconfig, and disable as many other startup applications as practicle.
Clean out your recent documents, temp and temporary internet files.
Disable find fast, and any other file indexing services.
Disable desktop themes, animated cursors, and sound events.

For the internet, use a compact browser in place of IE such as K-Meleon from http://kmeloen.sourceforge.net

From the hardware side:
From the performance tab of device manager;
Disable floppy seek
Set your system configuration to network server
Make sure that acceleration is on full for everything.

Sometimes, updating the motherboard drivers can improve performance.

I know you don't want to upgrade. However, I recommend adding more RAM to your system.
Increasing RAM to 128-196MB (add 64 or 128MB) will make a major impact for you.

before you even get into window problems check your bios to make sure all settings are correct and get a bios update if you can some are free some do cost,if u use fat 32 check your hard drive settings, it should be set to Lba large block access. and also other settings, i must apologize, first power down unplug open system make sureits dust free with a 1-2"inch paint brush, clean fan /heatsink and anything vissable of course brush should be dry,then after your done rechecking your bios or should i say cmos go into windows and get rid of programs and files you dont use anymore also checking your registry if your not sure how to do that get some software norton system works or mcafee utilities, pc mechanic, system mchanic or try zdnet for some freebee"s do a thorough scandisk and a defrag 3x their are even more settings as far as dma settings for hard drive and cdroms and even more settings for modem ,email me rati666@yahoo.com

Try a program called DISKEEPER. Set it and forget it option. Works great. Maybe a litlle more ram wont hurt.

There is an article in the Daily Drilldowns on this site called "Top 10 tips for troubleshooting PC system slowdowns". I have tried using the article with great results.
Hope it works for you

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