missing RAM, slow running games

I had a Windows 7 laptop for about a year.  had AVG free trial but after it ran out i just never renewed it.  I enjoy porn alot.  The outcome is predictable.  Google redirect virus and other shit.  one day computer took 30 minutes to start.  Tinkered around with trying to remove virus, everything was slow as fuck.  I'd installed Avast when i first noticed i had some viruses, it deleted like 10 viruses when i first installed it.  It did nothing to the Google redirect virus.  I had an Ubuntu CD so i popped it in and installed it on a portable drive.  I worked off of that for about a week, and then i torrented a copy of Windows XP pro.  I installed it (after some difficulty; my hard drive socket was incompatible with XP's installer so I had to switch to a legacy driver in BIOS)  and then discovered no networking capacity and no sound.  I had to find those drivers on my own, and it was a bit difficult.  I ended up having to get Windows 7-specific drivers and gamble on whether they would work on XP.  but here's my problem now: I had 4 GB of RAM under 7, and it ran fast.  Now that I've got XP set up on this thing, it's kinda fast but I discovered that when I tried to install any games on it, they run slow as fuck.  even minimalistic games like Liquid Wars, which was made for DOS.  I then discovered I only have 1.75 GB of RAM now.  Shit's so cash.  I then went to several overclocker's websites to see how i could loosen up this thang.  I went to Control Panel> Administrative tools> services and disabled several services.  I also switched off all the advanced graphics.  I even got CCleaner and ran it, and my comp seemed kinda faster (damned placebo effect!) Then I tried to install TastyStatic and run it and the thing was so slow I had to wait like 5 minutes to be able to play.  and it was just too slow to play.   What can i do/what did i do? 
List of all running proccesses:
taskmger.exe
plugin-container.exe
alg.exe
iPodService.exe
ObjectDock.exe
Rainmeter.exe
RTHDCPL.exe
AvastUI.exe
iTunesHelper.exe
explorer.exe
AvastSvc.exe
wuauclt.exe
svchost.exe (several of those)
mDNSResponder.exe
AppleMobileDeviceService.exe
lsass.exe
services.exe
winlogon.exe
csrss.exe
smss.exe
spoolsv.exe
firefox.exe
System
System Idle Process

what can you guys make of all this?