HP tends to put alot a extraneous garbage on the restore cd and therefore the system. If you hit CTRL+ALT+DEL once, you will probably see quite a bit of stuff in the task manager. Ideally, you want as little as possible in there. You can experiment by ending the tasks and see what happens or ,better yet search for those filenames on your C: drive and see what they go to.
The folder names etc might give enough info to tell what they are. Some of them are more difficult. By disabling the things that you don't want/need (anything starting with HP
) via msconfig you should be able to free up quite a bit more of your resources.
As for the RAM, 120 is kind of a strange number, but I wonder if it's because the video is integrated and sharing the system memory. HP used to advertise X amount of RAM with X amount shared all the time.