Still struggling with Computersaurus Crapex

Ugh. I don't know how I coped with this hideous desktop PC for all those years. I didn't think my little laptop was anything special, but I feel like I just traded in a Lotus Elise for a Morris Minor. I've managed to boost its performance a little by disabling numerous Windows services and switching a few more from automatic to manual, so they only start when needed. WinPatrol has helped here, because for some reason, not all services and start-up programs show up in Task Manager, Services or the System Configuration Utility but WinPatrol seems to find them all. I've also downloaded and installed a program called FreeRAM XP Pro, which I've set to automatically optimise the system's RAM every five minutes. This really seems to help keep it stable, as well as fixing the weird RAM drain problem the machine has. There still seems to be a problem with the CPU usage leaping up to 100%, although it's not as frequent an occurrence as it was before I disabled some unnecessary services.

DHL finally collected the laptop yesterday, and I'm hoping it will be back with me soon, fixed and not harmed in any way. Even with a few tweaks, this desktop monster is still hateful. And I don't have a free USB port for my camera. The beast only has two USB ports, one for my mouse, and another for the cable modem. So no new pic uploads until the laptop comes home.