Laptop turns slow

[sachingururani]

Hi
I m using my mum's acer aspire 4736 laptop, with configuration as below -
Intel core 2 duo t6570 @ 2.10 Ghz, 1.19 GHz, 956 MB ram, 360 GB harddisk with Windows XP Professional version 2002 service pack 2
I am using a 1 MB broadband connection supplied By MTNL (combo 512) which normaly gives me a download speed of 100-120 kbps on utorrent. However, my speed can go upto 360 kbps in the morning or at night. The problem is, i've noticed that as soon as the speed goes anywhere upwards then 200 kbps, my laptop becomes very slow. Windows take time for minimizing, windows sounds are very slow and any kind of general multimedia content plays very slowly. Can anyone please tell me why is this happening...and if there is any cure...
Also, i have seen this same thing happen once when i had restricted utorrent speed to 15 kbps and my mum was talking to someone on skype...
The odd thing is, i have another laptop at home which is my own, its a Dell Inspiron 1736 with windows 7 and 4 GB ram, and utorrent never gets more then 150 kbps on this laptop with the same Internet connection. It never slows down either.
I have already got the acer laptop checked at the acer service centre. Those guys gave the cooling fan a cleaning and returned the laptop a couple of days ago but i still got the prob. Should i go to them again or is this problem due to only 1 GB ram?
Here's the data from my task manager, if it helps..i noted this when three I.E tabs were open with utorrent, and two folder open...my antivirus was disabled , and still the laptop was running slow, with utorrent speed of 356 kbps download, upload limited to 25 kbps-
CPU USAGE 5 %
PF USAGE 355 MB
HANDLES 10409
THREADS 509
POCESSES 36
TOT PHY MEM 976796
AVAILABLE 583592
SYSTEM CACHE 278412
KERN MEMORY
TOTAL 80350
PAGED 39000
NON PAGED 40572
COMMIT CHARGE
TOTAL 367148
LIMIT 2938764
PEAK 406480
I am no tech wizard, but these look pretty ok to me...so do u see any problems???

 

[Harvey]

You're running on less than 1 GB of RAM. Anytime your system needs more RAM than is available, it swaps pages out to the swap file on your hard drive, which slows performance, especially when you're swapping a lot of data.

You didn't say whether your spec includes the RAM borrowed by onboard video, but if it includes the video RAM, you don't have a lot left for applications. Maximizing the RAM in the machine should help a lot because it will reduce disk swapping.

The 32 bit version of XP can only address a little over 3 GB of RAM, but if the machine can recognize 4 GB (2 x 2 GB), it can use some of the RAM above what the OS can see for the video RAM so installing 4 GB will maximize the amount of RAM available to Windows.