Hello all! Long time reader first time poster. Great website with a wealth of information though I couldn't find anything directly related to my issues so I decided to post & hopefully I'm in the right forum.

1) My computer has become increasingly slower over the past few months and I was curious if there's a way to SPEED up the start-up/loading time by scanning and disabling any 'background' programs that I may not need? I REGULARLY RUN AVG scans as well as Malware as a precaution because this is the same behavior that I experienced a year ago before I had to replace the hard drive due to a virus.

2) On a much lesser note my Adobe Flash player keeps timing out while on Facebook for some reason & I've cleared my cache, cookies & uninstalled/reinstalled it several times. Oddly enough, for example, I can access games like Farmvlle, which is Flash heavy, with one account but not another on the same computer so I'm not sure why I'm having issues.

I'm sure that I'll need to provide more information but here's my basic info:

Windows XP
Home Edition
Version 2002
Service Pack 3

HP Pavilion Intel
Pentium 4 CPU 3.40GHz
512 MB of RAM

Using Firefox/3.6.4

I'm a complete noob when it comes to computers so I'll APPRECIATE any suggestions that I receive.

Thanks!