Don't worry, I'm not going to attempt to take my HD apart to clean it...just open up the case and use some compressed air.

And to answer some of the questions here, my system restore disk is issued by Compaq, I don't have a seperate disk for XP Home Edition. I would downgrade, but I do like XP and personally, I don't have the cash to afford me a new MS OS. Now, I haven't tried avdvens suggestion of using the CD from DOS, etc. I am going to try cleaning out my registry, see what happens. I got a great defrag program to try, and additional advice, thanks to micael.

Rebooting does not solve the problem. It's just that after a while, from a fresh start (going back to a factory restore) my computer starts to lose it's performance, I get tons of error messages, and I don't do anything to get them, after a while, some programs refuse to open, freeze, it's as if my computer just slows down and dies after some time and the factory restore is the only thing that seems to solve this. This is the first computer ever that I've had a problem like this with. This is my first Compaq, and my first time using XP.

One problem that I am going to run into is that my computer hasn't started to slow down yet, but I know it will soon, so I won't be able to tell for sure if the suggestions are working, I guess it will be a matter of time to see if my system performance starts to decrease. Another thing that gets me, is that I LOVE this computer...It's a really nice computer, exactly what I wanted, but Avdven was right again in saying that Compaq support is crappy. They don't seem to really care now that I've bought their product. But, it was what I could afford, and there were so many bonuses to the package I bought, the software, additional hardware I received at no cost....But if the problem persists, I'm going to work through it this time instead of getting frustrated and factory restoring, if that means I have to spend a little cash to let a tech look at what's wrong, then so be it. I really shouldn't be having these problems. I wanted to get input and try to fix the problem though before I started if it was something I was doing wrong. I should know very soon whether or not it was not doing one or more of the things that you suggested.

Thanks for everyone's help!!! I really appreciate it.