Computer runs slow after installing photoshop

[DavePL]

I have a celeron-430 with 380MB RAM and it used to run pretty fast. Then I installed Photoshop and now a lot of things are much slower; It takes a long time to respond when clicking on an item in the start menu, and a long time to display files when you highlight a folder in Windows Explorer.
Both Photoshop and the scratch file are on the main hard drive, which seems to have enough free space. I have a second smaller hard drive, and wonder if it may be best to install Photoshop on that, in order to have Photoshop and the page file on different drives?

 

[pmonett]

It is useful to have the swap file on a different drive than the system. I have consistently found that global performance benefits noticeably from such a configuration.

Pascal.