I hate my laptop

I have had it for about 2 or 3 years, and it is starting to make me very upset. It has been running extremely slow lately. Everytime I try to open up a new window, it takes about two minutes. Also the other day, I tried to watch a TV show on it, but it was breaking up too much and I couldn't understand it. So I had to buy it off itunes since I had forgotten to set the Tivo. So I remembered a couple things that were in our text book this year. First I ran the Disk Cleanup, and then I ran the Disk defragmentation. This took a couple hours to complete, and it still did not make my computer go any faster. I thought it would for sure. And then yesterday a message popped up that I am running low on virtual memory. So my last guess is to get more RAM. I only have 480 MB of RAM now, so I am hoping that if I add more, my computer will respond better. A friend of our family knows how to install it, so I will try this option. If this doesn't work, then it might be time to get a new one.