A few simple tricks can bring your PC up to speed. If so, don't upgrade your processor quite yet. More than likely, your hard drive just needs to be defragmented. And if you're new to the world of Windows, you may not even know what fragmentation is or how to deal with it.
Fragmentation happens gradually.
Each time you access the information on your PC, your computer writes information to whatever areas of the hard disk happen to be free at the time, breaking the information into several different fragments. For example, your word-processing program files might be spread over many such areas on different parts of your hard drive, slowing down the load time of the files each time you access them. Defragmenting puts all the fragments of each file together on the same part of the disk and puts the areas of free space together as well, thus speeding up access time and making more free space available on the hard drive. To defragment your PC, click Start, then select Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and finally Disk Defragmenter. Once you're there, you can choose which of your hard drives to defrag.