Very slow vista laptop!

My mom's laptop is running really slow, so I am trying run defrag and other things to make it faster. Any help would be appreciated. This computer has already gone through the malware forum, so I know it's malware free. There are some known hardware problems with this computer, but none with the HD so far.(besides the lack of space on it)

This computer takes over 5 minutes to restart, so I know I have to fix it!

 

Greetings, MCorduan...

You might try this: click Start, Run, type msconfig, click OK...in the Startup section, are there a lot of entries?

 

What sort of known problems?
How much hard drive space is used? How much EAM in the computer?

 

Problems with the video card/chip or something....

Allot of space is being used, because of backups that are on the system. I will work on moving them to another place. That should help things.

 

Too vague. Open My computer. On C, right click, select properties and state Used space and Free space.
How much RAM? (typed E instead of R and I can not correct my error in the above post).

 

Hi my friend , you could follow this process

http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/maintenance/speed.aspx

improving your computer's speed even you should download this tool

http://www.hdsentinel.com/

checking your hdd's status !! :wave

 

The backups take up just over 100GB of space, and there is less than 13% of free space on the HDs

 

A computer will start acting weird when free space falls below 20%.
I also did some looking and saw that you can't run defrag if the free space falls below 15%. I can neither confirm nor deny that because my hard drives have more than 20% free.