Windows uses Virtual Memory to increase the apparent size of your RAM by creating “virtual” RAM on a part of your hard drive, and swapping information to and from the hard drive as it’s required. It’s a nice way to get around temporary situations where you require more RAM than is physically installed inside your computer, but if you constantly dip into the virtual memory, your system will slow down, as hard drive access is much slower than RAM access. You can certainly tweak your Virtual Memory size by heading to the System section in your Control Panel, clicking on Performance Options, and then changing the Virtual Memory option. A better long-term solution would be to actually physically increase the size of your physical RAM…everything will move much more quickly if you do.

As for the weird sound coming out of the speakers, make sure you have the latest driver for your graphics card first of all. Then make sure you don’t have anything plugged into the wrong jack on the back of your soundcard (ie make sure you don’t have a surround speaker plugged into a mic jack or something else like that). Lastly, make sure your speakers aren’t located right next to some massive power transformer…you might be getting some bleed through into the wires.