old laptop? re-tune?

I needed a laptop to take notes in school and I pulled out my old one that I've not used in 7 months or so.
I'm not sure what's going on with it, it's running really slow.
It's not been used in sometime, so I dont suspect ad-ware or spyware. I just plain dont know what's going on.
examples of this new slowness:
-when I start it up, I have to wait an ungodly time(5-7 mins) before I can hit the start button and see my list of programs or click on a saved document on the destktop to start Word.
-even after the above is done, when I right click on the desk top, it takes a few seconds

I have an XP OS and my laptops stats are
MS windows XP SP3
Intel Pentium 4 CPU2.4 Ghz, 447 Ram, RADEON 1GP 345M

my desktop is
MS windows XP SP2
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.3Ghz, 1.20GB RAM NVIDIA GeForce Fx 5500

is the laptop running soo freakn slow because of the SP3 and not SP2? if so, how do I change that?

 

I would try this post http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=106650

See if that helps. I'm sure it will help improve speed.

Also 512mb ram is kind-of low.

 

right,....but I tried to make a point that I havent used in almost a year and it wasnt so slow before, so why is it now? it has a wireless modem, but it is not enabled nor has it been connected online..

 

Strange

You could have malware or your drive could be fragmented.

 

Windows update looking for updates, security software looking for updates, java looking for updates...even if you aren't connected to the internet, those programs will try to update so they waste time before they figure out there is no internet connection.

If it were my computer, I'd downloaded all the updated security programs currently installed to another computer. Move the updated security programs over and install, then connect by ethernet and grab all the windows updates that haven't been installed for the last 7 months.

 

how do I do this?

because it spends forever "thinking" and I can't get it to anything.