Very slow after effect rendering

that PC should be perfectly capable of rendering a few minutes of 4k footage in well under an hour... in most programs. Your computer is a budget workstation for most production programs. Adobe media editing programs generally only use one core, and no GPU, so the more cores you have, the slower it is, the lower the clock speeds are, the slower it'll be, and the more of your budget you spend on your GPU the worse it'll be for AE, and so on.

Adobe programs are total RAM hogs, though, so it's maxing out your RAM, then trying to use your disk as RAM (we call this swapping), thrashing it with reads and writes as fast as it can handle, and possibly shortening its life by doing so, if you do this a lot. this is why when you run out of RAM, "you can't actually run out of RAM", as they say.

your computer is 2-8x more powerful than mine, but mine will render that video file in about the same time or lower, because mine has twice the RAM, 4 large cores that work at high clock speeds, and an older GPU (that doesn't really matter, here, and I keep GPU rendering turned off)

Yes, your PC is nothing to impress anyone. Aside from that you should simply get used to it. Very few things in AE are realtime and chewing through complex projects takes time. Of course the specifics depend on what stuff is actually involved, but without any info on that we can't even guess whether or not your render times could be optimized.

Mylenium