Startup and Services - Laptop performing poorly

What I work with:
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Dell Inspiron 1525 Laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo.
Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1
RAM 4.0 GB

Recent issues:
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Gradually getting slower over the past few months. I notice it mostly when booting up and using MS Word. It's taking an awful long time to boot up now. Today I locked up Word, and the last few days I have been dropping characters when typing. Also, I noticed on Task Manager that my physical memory usage is hovering around 45-50% with no programs opened.

Things I know that may be contributing:
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I have been studying for Medical Transcription and using Word 7 as my word processor. I installed a program call Shorthand 10. Yesterday I installed Dorland's medical spellchecker. I need both those software to be productive, however this may have caused the latest performance problem with my laptop. Although... I have been having issues before this, just not as significant.

What I have done so far to solve some issues:
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I ran my symantec/norton virus detector. I installed and ran CCleaner. I uninstalled many unused programs. Oh... and I turned off the bar on the right hand margin of the desktop where it shows the weather and my pictures... bummer.... I miss looking at it.

Below is a list of my Startup software:
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Is there anything in here I can uncheck or looks suspicious?

Windows Defender
Alps Pointing-device Driver
Intel(R) Common User Interface -----> There are 3 of these.
RAID Event Monitor
Dell Eireless WLAN Card Wireless Net…
dscactivate
Cyberlink PowerCinema
Google Desktop
QuickTime
Microsoft Windows Operating System
Dell Dock
Digital Line Detection
QuickStet

Services, and more services... OMG!:
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There are way too many type. I suspect this may be part of the problem. I have too much stuff running. I made print screens of everything and created a Word Doc. It is over 500 K so I can't upload it. Can I email it to someone? There has to be a tone of stuff I can disable from this list.

I wish for a simple cure:
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I have already spent hours (most of today and yesterday) looking to solve this issue and loosing patience. I need to get back to Medical Transcription. I attempted to follow some of the recommendations for Malware removal but this became overwhelming very fast. I am not a total looser with my computer just no where near Geek Lord level. :major I need a MajorGeek to help quickly solve what is probably a common problem. My old solution used to be to reinstall windows, but I really don't what to do that.

Thanks,

Lilou

 

You can disable most of the items listed in the msconfig startup list. I'd leave any antivirus/antispyware stuff (like Defender for example), and any hardware related stuff (like the WLAN stuff and RAID stuff), but anything else should probably be disabled (like QuickTime, Power Cinema, Google stuff, etc). As to system services that can be disabled, check out Black Viper's Vista Services Configuration web site for some VERY helpful info.... you should check out this link about basic maintenance, and perhaps run some scans for malware..... good luck! Let us know how it goes!

[dlb]