My fairly old PC has noticeably slowed in recent days when using Internet Explorer, to the point where web pages won't load for ages (e.g. 10 mins). This has not historically been a problem but looking at task manager there are 56 processes running. I am using Windows XP home with 512MB RAM. Would increasing the RAM help me, do you think? I assume that all the processes are vital to life, but I couldn't tell you what most of them do.
56 is rather a lot and could almost certainly be slimmed down. But more RAM would make a huge difference too, put at least another 1GB in there and it be like a different computer.