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i haven't had to fix a pc in years - spoiled myself when I went APPLE - using a friends HP PC while on the road and it is XP op system. keeps getting memory warnings - machine is SLOOOOOOOW.   In prior versions of windows you could do a ctrl alt del or something to see what was running in background and was hogging the machine.  There are icons on the top right but I feel there is something else that is slowing this guy (and sometimes locking up)????   

You can still do Ctrl+Alt+Del to get to the Task Manager, which will show you what processes are running and how much memory they're using.

What icons are in the top right corner?  There's the system tray in the bottom right corner (typically), but there usually aren't icons in the upper right corner.

Depending on if your friend has anti-virus and/or anti-spyware software installed, the computer could be infected with malware/spyware and/or viruses which could slow the system down.  There are tons of free spyware removal tools out there (Spybot Search & Destroy and Malwarebytes' anti-malware come to mind for starters) which can give some good results.

If there's nothing or little of significance on the computer that needs to be saved, sometimes the fastest way to repair the system is to save any important files to a USB drive and then do a full drive format and re-install of Windows, which will resolve just about any malware/spyware/virus issues.

thank you - task manager only shows task and what is running - no usage figures - the icons on the top right "volumn" "safely remove hardware" "quick time" to name a few - the is a icon that shows cpu usage which shows low usage of 11% or so.  They do have norton utilities - I will run a scan and see what gives = memory warnings are the symptom so maybe they do have an infection.  thanks.

Whenever I get infected with something...I like to back up all my files to a thumb drive
and format the hard drive, re-install windows and throw my stuff back in from the thumb drive.
The trick is to remember to back up stuff first though before the hard drive dies... :25-

I've had to do it twice to a 12 year old XP computer.
I think I got my money's worth outta that puppy! lol

Cloning is no good because it brings all the junk onto your new hard drive...better to start fresh, like new!

knagl's suggestions are good but get these anti-malware fighting stuff from reputable websites like PCWorld.com
NEVER click on an ad...always go to original downloads!

I am unclear on the type of mem errors you are seeing.  It is possible the disk is near full which will slow things way down.  Prior to running malware bytes and search and destroy as mentioned do a disk clean up and delete unused files.  If you can't  clean up 20% of the disk then un install some apps. 

You should see something like below. It should be showing memory usage. If you click on the CPU tab, it will sort the items by CPU usage. Often you can see what it using a lot of processor time. I suggest downloading something like Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. The free version does a pretty good job of finding crap.

can't find task manager but did find SAFETY and found they hadn't cleaned browsing history for YEARS - it ran for hours before i stopped it - will try again over night but that would be an issue.

A good program to clean up a computer is " CCleaner"
The C stands for crap and it's free.

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download (http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download)

use ccleaner to clear browser history if it doesn't on its own.  You can also boot into safe  mode for clean up which often will allow things to work that wouldn't before.

also when using ccleaner be sure to run several times until it says there are no erros

Be a little careful with ccleaner. Only select one item at a time for it to analyse, and do the registry backups it prompts you to do each time. Then reboot before doing the next section. Better safe than sorry. I've had it remove stuff it really should not have.