Everyone has this conception that no candidate for president should be too intelligent -- the phrase "out of touch" has been used in this election frequently. Palin was selected to help make the Democrats appear elitist, despite Obama growing up poor.

This seems absurd to some but there's a history lesson that invokes this. The Republican party is reacting to a president who has low ratings and scandal just as the Democrats did this with Woodrow Wilson in the early part of the century. Wilson was clean, clean, clean and probably would not have been elected if the other side wasn't divided.

Wilson was brilliant but totally unconnected and made one of the worst decisions of any president when he refused to compromise and get the Treaty of Versailles passed in the Senate. He was a staunch idealist and made a decision that might have been a big reason for WWII.

The problem with a candidate that's on the other side of Wilson's brilliance is that, while they might be in touch, they are inevitably either going to be puppets of their advisers. This happened to Wilson's successor Harding, who was not qualified for the office and let his friends and his party make his decisions and run his office.

Its clear that Palin is far from Woodrow Wilson but, should she come to power, let's hope will be both in touch and choose good advisers.

I'm less optimistic that changing your virtual memory settings than some other members here. I don't think it will make much difference, as most systems are fairly self-managing on this end. In fixing computers, I've never modified the virtual memory settings, unless they had a second hard drive. Even then I didn't change the size, only moved it over to the other drive.

However, in almost every case, adding more memory *will* increase speed of the computer, especially Vista. After a certain level (about 2 gigs for Vista, 1 for XP and Mac, 512 for most other systems), the speed will only be noticeable at startup. Still, it never hurts to add more.

If the system remains slow after this, try uninstalling any unnecessary programs. If this doesn't work, try backing up all your files and restoring the computer with the install disks.

If your system is still running slow after this, talk to a professional. In very rare cases, a piece of hardware may be causing problems and either needs a firmware update or to be replaced.