Anonymoys John,
A friend of mine complained of the same laptop laziness you mention, and from her description, the slowing was gradual but she became fed up quickly.
This laptop- an 18-month old 1.8GHz with Windows 7 Home Premium, had scheduled defrag, antivirus, and I added Malwarebytes anti-malware and found nothing. My prime suspect was that there were multivarious registry errors, but even that figure was not serious. This system had only 600-something errors- the lowest I'd ever seen! I believe those free registry checking programs just generate random numbers over 2,500 and promise to fix the first 800 to scare users into buying the full program. Another friend paid $40 for one of these magic registry elixirs to fix the 2,739 errors which it did too quickly to be believed, and the performance was not altered one bit. ther may well be useful application of this kind, I just haven't heard any personal accoutts of them. Rant complete. I did however notice MyStart Incredimail, which, like it's evil cousin Incredibar search engine redirector, acts in a way I and apparently many others think of as malware. What I did find was that in Task Manager, there were 67 processes running and sapping the GPU time and RAM. I turned everything off that could be turned off, removed unused programs- though on orders- not the suspicious Incredimail as my friend liked it and she didn't feel like setting up new email accounts and sending out hundreds of email change of address notices. A noticeable feature were that there were 3.6GB of temp files and 1.2GB in the recycling bin. A simple change though may have made the most difference, to change the Windows 7 theme from Aero to Basic and disable transparency. I use a Dell Precision T5400 dual quad core Xeon and when I changed graphics card , I used the Aero theme and the system seemed sluggish. Using Passmark Performance Test, with Aero, the system had a rating of 1939. Changing to Basic theme and no transparency alone changed the rating to 2315!
When all this was done, the turning off and cleaning, I was unsure how much had been accomplished, but I was informed the laptop was back to form. I'm not 100% certain, but tend to believe that the Aero to Basic theme change was probably responsible for most of the improvement.
Sorry, for a kind of generic ramble, but the cure seemed to be a kind of generic ramble of seemingly tiny adjustments that appeared to add up. My suggestion for your limping laptop is to install and run Passmark Performance Test- there's a 30-day free trial, and then compare the test results from you laptop to other tests of the same model. If the test results are not too seriously off, you might try the tasks mentioned, Malwarebytes, registry error check (maintaining a healthy skepticism), turning off Aero if if's running, all the auto-fuss and background programs- tasks, backup, etc., and clean out and unused programs, temp files, and obsolete data files. If the performance is severely off the others' marks, it may be time to wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything, or if some parameter is really off- RAM, disk, memory, 2D, 3D, then you might look into relevant hardware issues and run memtest, try a different video card if you have one or inboard graphics.
Someday, computers will be both useful and fun! Let us know how you get on.
Cheers,
BambiBoom