Old and crochety

For some time now my PC has been working sluggishly in some areas: I thought it was the browser, so I swapped from Google Chrome back to Firefox, but that made little difference.  I cleaned out the programmes that load up at start up, and that helped sometimes.  There's a curious inconsistency about how things run these days.  I'll click on a link in one browser page, and it'll begin to load up that page, and then everything gradually stops.  Sometimes I use control, alt, delete to bring the machine back to the restart page; I don't actually have to restart; just giving things a little fright by threatening to seems to be enough to get things working again - and the page that's causing the trouble will load.  Now if it was always the same kind of pages, I'd have an idea perhaps why things are sluggish, but it can be all sorts of random pages.

Perhaps the machine is just getting old and crochety, like its owner.  Or perhaps there's just too much stuff loaded onboard, and it's tired.  I've tried various clean-ups, like getting rid of excess stuff, but that only helps for a bit and then things go back to this other normality.

I see there are various sites offering to help me speed up PCs, but I'm not keen to try these (and anyway, one of them just tells me to get rid of some of the programmes that load at start up, which I've already done) because I don't know what they're adding to my machine as well as the program they offer.  It's possible that I need more RAM - there seems to be plenty of hard disk space available still - and I suppose that would be an option.

Or else it's just that they're digging up all the roads around my suburb at the moment and wiring us up for super fast broadband - and this is temporarily slowing things up.  The only problem is that by the time super fast bb arrives, my machine may have conked out entirely...