My PC (which is running on Vista, using Google Chrome and is admittedly a bit old) has gradually become painfully slow.
So far I have cleaned the registry and deleted all cookies which has helped a little.
The memory is at around 50% capacity.
And other ideas on other things I could try tho help it along?
Thanks in advance (keep it simple please)!

Get rid of vista.

can you give us an idea of the spec of your PC? I second getting rid of Vista and going windows 7. An OEM version can be had cheap. If you are willing to spend a bit more say £50 you could add an SSD as your primary hard drive. Probably the best way to give an old PC some extra life.

if it would run vista, however slowly, it’ll run 7 i’d expect.

If it’s gradually getting slower then I’d look at;

1) run malwarebytes
2) look at what processes and services are running at any time

uninstall any software you haven’t used for a year.

and see what happens then.

Web pages are becoming ‘richer’/larger over time so even browsers are putting more load on cpu/memeory etc than they used to but for purely browsing I wouldn;t worry about changing OS to try and speed things up.

Having said that a clean install of Vista would probably make the biggest difference as it would get rid of accumulated crap from however many years you’ve been adding stuff to the original build.

Get CCleaner. Very effective tidier upper and registry repairer.

https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

then run the hard disk checker from C:/ “Properties”.
Will run on reboot and take a good while. Should mark the inevitable dead sectors as unusable. loose a couple of kb of overall storage, but saves a lot of slow down if there are issues

Stop cleaning your registry. It’s not dirty, leave it alone.

Other than that, what wwasnotwas said.

what seavers said.

The memory is at around 50% capacity.

How much do you have? And do you really mean memory (RAM)?

I’m not going to suggest you get a shiny new mac.

Last year I replaced 32 bit XP Pro with 64 bit Win 7. Made a very useful difference – something to do with the 64 bit OS allowing better memory utilisation…? (32bit OS not utilising all of the 4GB RAM IIRC)

Also recommend Malwarebytes and CCleaner

Without a doubt get an SSD, Samsung Evo 840 120gb, best £60 you can spend!

Fitting one in my old mans pc too which is 7 years old, goes like an absolute rocket. On par with my i7 quad for general browsing, office, etc.

Last year I replaced 32 bit XP Pro with 64 bit Win 7. Made a very useful difference – something to do with the 64 bit OS allowing better memory utilisation…? (32bit OS not utilising all of the 4GB RAM IIRC)

The biggest improvement will be from the flatten and rebuild, the second biggest will be going from XP to 7. The “memory utilisation” theory is bobbins I’m afraid (I wrote about this the other day, I’m not doing it again).

Also recommend Malwarebytes and CCleaner

Again, your registry is not dirty. CCleaner has its place, but “my computer is slow” isn’t one of them.

Dunno about memory utilisation and whatever, but my OH’s laptop was running Vista and was pretty much unusable. Even after the HDD died and we used the Dell disk to put Vista back on it was pretty painful.

I took the plunge and swapped it to Win7 and the difference was night and day! It runs perfectly fine on Win7.

I would clean it up as much as you can and if still not happy, try Win7.