my laptop is running slow?

You may have to many left over temporary files. Those can accumulate and heat 100s of Mb or even Gb on your drive. This clutter can realy slow you down.
Concider running Ccleaner periodicaly. Once a month is normaly enough. It does a marvelous job hunting and suppressing those old files. It's a free utility.

If you have a conventional hard drive, you should defragment it periodicaly. After suppressing unused files is the best time: There are less files and more free space.
Defragmenting should be done about once a week.
Defragger is a very good and free option. It can defragment a drive with only 1% of free space, but it will take much longer.

NEVER EVER defragment any SSD! They don't need it and it can adversely affect them by cutting their longevity.

As said before, take a good look at the applications starting in the background.
For each one that you find, ask yourself: Do I REALY need that to always run on my computer?
If the answer is "No" or "I don't know", disable the option of having it start automaticaly.
You realy don't need any so called quick start or preloader items. Those only slow down the boot process before getting pushed on the page file.

Think about uninstalling old applications and accessories that you no longer use.

Be sure that you have a descent to good anti-virus installed.
You can have more than one as long as ONLY one is set to run automaticaly. The other(s) should be used in manual mode.
Malwarebite is good. You can also look at AVG, Avast and Avira. They all have a free version available.

I use Firefox. About as fast as Crhome, maybe even slightly faster.
AdBlock plus is also available on Firefox. In fact, it was originaly a Firefox only extention.
Both Firefox and Chrome have a "Private browsing" mode. You don't need any addon as the private mode prevent ALL cookies and session information to stay after you close the browser.

Don't wory about cookies. They are NOT a security nor privacy risk in any conceivable way.

Start the task manager and sellect "Show tasks from all users".
A keyboard shortcut to start it: Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc.

Take a look as "svchost".
Some times, when your computer get sluggish, you'll see an instance using over 100 000 bytes, probably more that 200000, and using more than 5% CPU load. Kill it. It will restart aotomaticaly..

Adding more memory can help, especialy if you regularly use memory intensive applications or many applications at the same time. More RAM mean that you have more room before the computer start using the page (or swap) file whitch is WAY slower than RAM.
It's NOT a cure all.

Electro
November 2014

Your laptop will be running just as fast as the day you first used it - it just seems slow because it's probably doing too much work.

Begin by finding the start-up list and uncheck (stop running) all the things that automatically get loaded at start time - there my be dozens of them - many you've never hear of and have no idea what they do.

Next get a free copy Malwarebytes and run it - there will be several dozen naughty things lurking in the depths of your machine - Malwarebytes will remove them for you.

Next consider using Google Chrome as your web browser - they say it's faster than Internet Explorer.

Add extensions to Google Chrome...

1) ABP Adblock Plus (free) - my copy has stopped 54,726 pop ups so far.

2) Add Disconnect for Chrome (also free) to keep your browsing private.

Last of all discover and use Task Manager - this will tell you what processes are using up all the machine resources (computer time) - if the machine's still running poorly then one process or another will be the culprit - Task manager allows you to Kill the process.

Some may tell you to add extra memory to solve your problem-a bit like putting a larger fuel tank in your car to solve a slow running problem - do it by all means but don't expect a miracle.

Task Manager can be found by right clicking in the Task Bar at the bottom of the screen.

At the moment the load on my CPU with just Google Chrome and Task Manager running is varying between 0% and 6%.

Good luck...
November 2014