Bogging down again

With all the work I'm doing on this machine, even at my snail's pace, I might have several tabs open at once. I got rid of all of HP's crap and I run CCleaner religiously, but I'm bogging down sometimes terribly. I've wasted a bit of money on "fixes" and I get conflicting reports about all of 'em (they're usually registry cleaners). I thought I saw improvement w/ Uniblue, but I was told by some experts that it's crap as well. Is there anything that a layman can do to speed this beast up?

PS: I downloaded additional memory not long ago. I'm completely broke right now, so anything costing money will need to wait until next month. I need to get this thing purring steadily.

C'mon guys. I run CCleaner, Malware Bytes and Spybot. I've installed MSE. I'm trying hard to take all the good advice I can get. I really can't help right now that I have a learning disability, though it seems to be getting better. I'm trying to live a productive life, but it just gets harder every day.

Google seems especially slow. I run Firefox because IE is just to intimidating for me. In fact, I tried to turn this thing into an MS slave, but gave up. I tried Google Chrome, but went back to Firefox. Thunderbird fetches mail from Google, so it's no improvement.

Next month, I'll look into increasing my connection speed, but I may be at max (up to 1.5 MBps), but it's DSL and there's no broadband or fiber optic capability in my area.

This living in the sticks has its drawbacks, but it's what I wanted so now I have to deal with it, but I spend way too much time on this silly machine.

When if ever have you have you re-formatted or more commonly called a clean install or your OS? Personally I do one at least once a year. Have you looked into satellite for your broadband? It can be expensive but a nice alternative for those that live in really rural areas. In all your browsers, disable all add ons that should help alleviate some of the sluggishness on the browser side of things.