I am getting the error message Marco is not responding
 

I only have a little bit of memory and can't afford to upgrade at the moment..is there anything I can do to speed up my computer? It freezes and runs slow. I also only have 4gigs available also.
Thank you

Indeed, 4GB RAM is not a lot, but it's not "a little bit" either.

Since your question is very general, so is my answer: Don't run programs that use a lot of memory. In case this is a PC with a GUI, use a lightweight GUI like Xfce or a distro like Lubuntu or Puppy. Use a tool like top to find out which processes are the biggest memory consumers.

I don't know who or what Marco is, though.

@berndbausch marco is the default window manager for MATE.

@OP berndbausch is right. MATE is probably a bit too heavy for your hardware. Another option besides distros he mentioned could be antiX.

I would say don't use a desktop environment at all. Just use a window manager like fluxbox or icewm. You won't have desktop icons that way (unless you add an icon manager) but who needs those when you have a desktop menu?

I have the same amount of memory as you and I consider it lavish! It's twice what I had on my old machine.

If you are using Chrome as your browser, try something lighter. The browsers based on Chromium tend to eat RAM. Firefox has an option unload the RAM from tabs you are not reading.
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/03/01/fi...mprove-memory/
Chrome might have an extension that does the same.

Marco runs fine on my Dell Mini 10V and ACER AOA150 netbooks (Atom N270, 1GB RAM), so it and the Mate DE are very unlikely to be the problem. A web browser could well be the cause of your problem. Another possibility is overheating.

You can run htop and sort by memory usage by clicking on the MEM%, that will help you narrow down if it is an app causing the problem.

4 GB RAM should be enough for any contemporary Linux distro, including Mint, in home use. I used Mint on bare metal for several years and currently have Mint in a VM with 4 GB RAM allocated to it and it runs quite nicely.

I would suggest that you investigate what processes are consuming your RAM, perhaps by running top or htop in a terminal as you do your regular activities and checking it from time to time, particularly when and if you get error messages.

Also, what is "marco"? (A web search leads me to think that it is related to the MATE window manager, which is relatively light-weight; if so, I'm inclined to think there's something going on here that requires deeper investigation before you take precipitate action, he said polysyllablically.)

I think you can probably address this without moving to an ultra-light-weight distro like AntiX (though I must say, AntiX is a nice piece of work).

Just a few thoughts.

The 4G could also mean the internal storage, the OP is unclear there.
I belive some very old netbooks had that little.

But apparently the issue isn't very urgent...