vista lag issues

Hi. Been having some serious lag issues the past few months. I am pretty sure its no malware issue since I use Avast and Windows Defender for that and do scans and removal.

I had a hard drive crash last year on my lenovo r61 laptop and had to get it replaced. I dont think the new one is defective since it appear to work ok, but i can hear the HD working constantly especially when screen saver is on.

I have installed many programs since then, some of them quite heavy like microsoft flight simulator, lock-on air combat, plenty of dosbox games, links 2003 golf, etc. I mostly use my computer for business email, games and surfing the web.

I do know that auto-defrag on vista is said to cause problems sometimes and thus I turned it off when I changed my HD last year. I figured THAT could be causing HD to burn out from excessive use.

I also suspect RAM is over-loaded and computer reads from stored page files on the hard drive rather than from ram.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS MORE LIKELY, and what is the best solution? I do leave my computer plenty of idle time to free up ram but I dont want to burn down my LCD screen either.

Thanks for any potential help!

 

There are no yellow exlamation points in device manager. I have installed all the updates for vista home basic up till now. October has not been released yet. I dont recall what service pack it is.

I have installed plenty of games, and Avast AV. I use windows defender for antispyware which is built in to the operation system.

The lag issue started several months after changing HDD, which was last year, but got really bad this spring. I kept adding more games, more files, etc. Plus they gave me a whole bunch of adware programs with the new HDD, which I had to manually remove.

I have stopped with auto-update on most programs to install them whenever I have time. My friend said turn off auto-defrag and I have done so.

Maybe I dont have enough RAM combined with too many programs that need transfering to the HDD?