I have a HP Pavilion Celeron 766 with 320 ram

My problem is that after i download a large file off of the internet or am on the computer for a long time, my computer slows down gradually to where it is too slow to do anything.

Could it be that my cpu is overheating and it needs additional cooling?

Should I put a fan on the hard drive?

or is there another problem?

What programs are running in the background? Try running msconfig(start-->run-->msconfig) and see what is on the startup. Look to see if your anti-virus is slowing your computer down. I think if your cpu was overheating, your computer would just stall out. . .also, once rebooted is it fine? still takes the same amount of time to freeze, or progressively slower? Try downloading cacheman 4.1 to see what your memory is doing.

there is a memory leak in windows ME... only frequent rebooting helps
read this thread
http://www.computing.net/windowsme/wwwboard/forum/11917.html
Regards Miro

I have been using Windows ME exclusively since it came out last year and have never had this so-called 'memory leak' problem. Maybe it is because I use a fixed size swap file - I run a lot of large applications and deal with large-sized files all the time. Also you should check your Windows Temp directory and your cache settings on Internet Explorer - maybe it is time to clear things out?