Laptop Running Slow

Hi guys,
My 3 year old toshiba equium has been running very slow and I don't really know why. It's been like this for about a year now which was tolerable as it wasn't too bad, but now it's just getting annoying.
Here's the Spec:

OS- Win XP Pro SP2
CPU - 1.66Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo T2300 (Socket 479 mPGA)
Ram - 1536mb DDR2 PC2-4300 @ 266mhz
HDD - 75Gb (6.5Gb Free)

a while ago, my laptop was out of commission due to a faulty charger so the laptop went unused for about three or four months. During that time I decided to speed up my girlfriends netbook by donating a Gig of Ram from my own laptop, which left me with 1Gig on board and 526mb lying around in my drawer.
When I eventually got a new charger, the processing speed of the laptop had slowed a little more obviously because it was working with less ram but there were a few things that started to bother me. Here's some of the issues I'm having

When playing back audio or video of any kind it sounds like there's a time stretch effect over the audio which is really irritating.
Boot time Startup takes about 10 minutes to complete,
Programs take a while to start-up and open,
scrolling tends to freeze when opening folders with large amounts of files.

In addition to these problems, I also have a very short battery life which is probably down to some dead battery cells as I always had the laptop plugged in.
Also, the base of the laptop becomes very hot when working for prolonged periods of time.
I'm not too sure whether or not the last two issues are actually affecting the speed of the laptop but I thought it would be worth mentioning.

What I have done so far,
Ran virus scans with panda cloud, malwarebytes, SuperAntiSpyware and Hitman Pro. A couple of minute threats were found but no real change in computing performance.
Ran a Registry defrag and a HD Defrag multiple times
Removed many unwanted programs,
removed many startup entries,
Ran tune up apps 2010 optimization.

After all of this I'm still having performace issues. It mainly only happens when processor intensive operations are executed.

Any help with getting this back to speed would be great.

Thanks very much!

 

Thanks for the quick reply,
Startups are being managed by Anvir Task Manager Free edition, Malware bytes is free edition, and as SAS proved to be very useful when dealing with a nasty virus I got on my PC I decided to purchase it.

I've Run CCleaner for cleaning the registry about a week ago, I also ran a defrag on the HDD but I don't think I ran it enough to clean EVERYTHING so I'll run it again.

Hard to believe that Panda Cloud might be causing the problem but I'll disable it to find out if that's the culprit. Do you know which Native AV software is the lightest off hand? I don't want to dedicate too many resources just to an AV prog but at the same time I want to have excellent protection. Maybe I'm asking for too much

I've attached a copy of the start-up log, there's only about 6 or 7 items, most are for protection and optimisation.

Let me know if there's anything else you need.

Thanks for your help

-Vin

 

Couple of quick thoughts:

Be careful, there: that's a lot of data for a 1.6gb processor to have to sort through.

Avast! is very good: lightweight, unobtrusive, self-updating.

And, of course, the obvious: beef up your memory, see if the symptoms change.

Agreed with Halo about the Safe Mode: if the symptoms change while in Safe Mode, then the problems must be coming from some 3rd-party program(s).

 

I'm fortunate enough to own both a laptop and a P.C so both threads are necessary. No point trying to fix two in the one thread. It just gets confusing, so I thought.