Someone Enlighten Me

I am confused. Maybe it's because I've turned suddenly senile recently (my "35" landmark), but I just don't get it.

My computer was fast, back in the day. It was slick and sleek and cool and up-to-the-minute for all of about 38 seconds before something better came out on the market. It's like 5 or 6 years old now and has nothing like "gig" associated with it other than storage capacity, but it was fast: It would boot in less than a minute and could burn a CD in less than 3. I could run 8 different programs at once and never had a problem. Then a "goodie" hijacked my IE and my whole computer went to shit. Eventually I said "piss on it" and did a system restore, starting with a fresh slate. It was fast again! After that, I was careful with what I downloaded, checking after each program to see if it affected its performance, and all seemed right with the world.

Now just a couple months and no additional downloading later, it's slow again. Aggravatingly slow. And I get this stupid message from time to time that my virtual memory is low and Windows is increasing the size of my page file. Being somewhat computer illiterate (I was raised on DOS and Windows was Greek to me), I sought out help online and found some XP tweaks to see if it would help. This pile of shit did speed up some, but I can't get rid of this stupid virtual memory message when I have 2 or more programs open at once. It's really enough to piss a person off when you need to have open a word processing program and a transcription program simultaneously in order to WORK and you keep getting this stupid message and nothing does what it's supposed to, the voice files babbling away on their own and no way to stop them.

Reboot. Yeah, it's fine for a while but then gets funky again. And it hates ANYTHING running Java. Now, I hate coffee too, but this piece of shit was supposed to have been built to like it, or so I thought.

Maybe I'm just expecting too much from an old dinosaur of a computer, but I don't have the means of buying anything new and don't really want to have to put all my stuff on a new computer anyhow. That's boring and takes time I don't have. Maybe I should tie it to the bumper of the car and take it for a drive like I keep threatening to do to it, said threats obviously not working since my computer just keeps "laughing" at me.

WHY ISN'T IT AS AWESOME AS I WAS WHEN I BOUGHT IT? Do Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have a scheme going that makes their computers shitty after a couple years so you are FORCED to buy a new one and keep them in business? ARGH!

Rant over. I don't really require an answer from you, but if you've got one for me I sure wouldn't turn it down!