If your computer was freezing, then it could have been either a hardware or software issue. Now you've reformatted, and it's just running slow? First, you have only 256MB of RAM, which is decent for XP. Also, you're not telling us what programs you have running in the background. How many processes do you have running, and what is your processor speed. It could be a case of you're trying to do too much, with too little.