Why is my internet so slow ?!?!?

This 'puter was running like garbage for a while. I took it in, got the harddrive cleaned (no spyware problems or anything), and added another stick of 256. It brought me up to 512mb. When I am not online, it runs fine, but when Im on the net, it maxes out the memory and brings the system to her knees.

Currently I am downloading a song from bearshare, and I can barely type. Any ideas? An 8mb file with 444 hosts is taking about 5 minutes. I have dsl. We got a new modem a couple of days ago. It was doing this before the modem, and its the reason I took it in to get the HD cleaned.

If Im just on ATS it seems ok, but if I try to watch a movie or anything, it maxes out and lags.

A bottleneck can take place anywhere along the line. Slow pages (slow browsing) has very little to do with the power of your PC (CPU, RAM, etc.).
You can clear your Internet History Folder, and Cache as well as unnecessary downloaded objects (Tools>Options>General Tab>Settings>View Objects). This might solve the problem, but I doubt it.

Change the buffer size of the program(s) you're using, i.e. make it bigger. You'll usually find it under options and/or settings.

A slow connection can be because your ISP is useless (unable to carry the traffic load through the servers/gateways).
It can also be because you're trying to download big files while Internet traffic is heavy. Rather download big files while the rest of your country is sleeping. And BTW downloading an 8MB file in 5 minutes really isn't all that slow.

Well. That's my guesses. Difficult to tell from this side of the planet...

it also depends on the upload speeds of the peopel you're downloading from. as for bearshare, i noticed before, maybe it was jus me i dont know, but it seemed to mess up my dns connection at times which will always slow you down and in many cases jus make the connection time-out..maybe it was all the adware crap that comes loaded in bearshare and wont run unless you keep them in your system lol.

You might also try shutting down any other programs you have running in the background. See what is in the bottom right hand corner on you system tray.

My vote goes for crappy P2P software robbing all available bandwidth.
(also might have memory leak and bug which consumes CPU time)

use Ctrl+Alt+Del and go to Processes tab and check how much which program consumes memory and takes CPU time.