thrillseeker007

hello everyone, i have a question about my laptop. i have an
AMD Athlon(tm)2500, 519Mhz, 192MB laptop. it is about 4 years old.
Generally it has always been slow, it is used predominately for word and avi documents and movies. and surfing the net.
Recently it has become real slow, it still has 15GB left on the hard drive.
I use spyware terminator and avg free and system mechanic professional 6 to help me keep it clean and virus free.
I am going to buy an external hard drive that connects to the tv and move all my movies and music to that. I have also been told that once i move everything to the external hard drive i should also re-install windows.

Will this drastically improve the speed of my laptop?

But what can i do in the meantime to speed it up?

When i use system mechanic, and go to the memory mechanic I de-frag things and recover memory, but its only temporary and doesnt really make much difference.
Also recently has been popping up a windows message saying i have very little virtual memory. What can I do?

Instead of dowloading more programs to help me, is anything there i can do to improve the memory with what I´ve got.

I appreciate any help what so ever. thanks