need help with my thinkpad R51 2883-8qu

[thinkpad459]

hello i have an ibm thinkpad R51 2883-8qu the specs are 30 gig hard drive 1.4 ghz pentium m 512 meg ram 64 meg intel extreme graphics 2 and windows xp my problem is that the laptop is so slow it takes the computer a good 30 seconds to load my web pages even though im on cable high speed internet also my operating system is super slow can some one please tell me or atleast help me figure out what the problem is i cant be sure if the 512 megs of ram is the problem or what?i mean my research tells me that xp should do fine on a 512 meg laptop but im not that computer savy i did purchase this computer in a trade i traded my old crappy 2001 desktop for this laptop as i needed a laptop more then i did a desktop keep in mind i only plan to use the laptop for web surfing and not for games whats wrong with my laptop could it also be that this laptop has a crappy xp install

[Neil]

How much free space is there on the hard drive. It's a rather slow drive to begin with, and if it's nearly full there won't be enough swap space. Such a situation would slow things to a crawl for sure.

And, yeah, if the laptop has the same XP install that it's had for years, it may well be very infected with malware that's slowing things down. Safest way to go with a laptop, or any other computer for that matter, that is acquired used, is to wipe the HDD and install your own OS. That way you know what's on there.