HELP!! Computer Is Slow

I'm not very computer smart, so I need as much help as I can possibly get. I purchased a new Dell a few months ago and all was fine. As of late it has started running very slow. Sometimes it will take up to 5 minutes for something to open (internet, microsoft money, excel, etc.). Sometimes if something is running it will say the program is "not responding".
I have done all that I know of. Ran a virus scan through Norton, downloaded Lavasoft's Ad-Aware and ran that. I do have two viruses is my quarantine file listed as "download.trojan". Would this have anything to do with the slowness of my computer since it is in quarantine?
Any help that can be given would be highly appreciated!

Thanks,
Bryan

 

Go to this section http://forums.majorgeeks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=35 and read the stickies.

 

Nah! dont think its hurting anything or doing anything for that matter in quarintine. Have you defragged the harddrive recently? I just fixed somebody's pc that is only a year old and was running slow and when i put diskeeper on, it like reorganized the entire hd and it had the same syntoms you had. Try downloading this:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Diskeeper_Home_Edition_d4382.html
WARNING!: If you use that program, you will lose the windows defragmentor permanently so use at your own risk!
Or instead of that do a regular plain jane windows defrag and see if that helps you.
-the new tech guy