Being a computer geek wanna be for years, I've learned quite a bit about my computer. But, now I'm stumped. I'm getting messages that I don't understand and don't know what to do.

Mostly, it crashes several times a day. AOL always locks. Constantly restarting. Get LOW MEMORY messages alot. I have a 40 gig hard drive and 256 RAM. Maybe I need to install more RAM?

I also think there may be some software conflicts. I cleaned things up with defrag and skan disk not too long ago and that helped for a little while, but things are going south again fast. I'm better at fixing hardware than fixing software conflicts.

I'm tempted to scrub the hard drive and start over, but "CRINGE"!!!, that's time consuming!

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Terri