UPDATE: Doing a disk cleanup

[canetoad]

4. It's more than likely

That the main thing slowing your laptop down is a multitude of programs that automatically start when you first boot up.

Couple of ways to check; look at the bottom right of screen on the taskbar. This is called the Systray - system tray and it shows icons for some windows processes but also other programs that are running at a system level. If you have say, Adobe reader, skype, more than one security program or anything else showing down there you can find them and turn them off.

In your 'All Programs' list there should be a Startup folder. Start looking there. If you have a big line of icons on the right side of the task bar, get back to us and we can brainstorm a fix.