Laptop getting really slow

Recently my laptop has been running really slowly. Its taking a few minutes to turn on and off and the general running is just becoming slower and slower.

Im pretty sure its not a virus as I have norton installed and nothing is abnormal in that respect.

My hard drive is nearly full up, does this make the laptop run slowly?

And also, what measures can I take to try and improve the performance?

depends on how full the hard drive is. might be worth clearing out your temp files. personally i wouldn't use norton as that slows a machine down in the first place as its bloated and a system hog. if my pc started slowing down, i'd just go back to an earlier disc image where i know everything ran fine

Id get rid of norton first...it took up 14GB on my laptop...i use avg its free...i also use advanced windows care to clean my laptop of temp files and fix any problems with the registry..its also free

Temporary files are bastards they fuck up your computer more than anything else

thanks. also just another quick problem.

Suddenly my touchpad on my laptop has gone a bit dodgy. On websites and pages Im not able to use the far right of the touchpad to scroll down. This has only just happened and was wondering if anyone knows why this might be.

Download crapcleaner here & run it, it rids you of all manner of unwanted crap & cookies!

Then run the registry scan & that will fix broken links etc

Then hit tools & you can delete any unwanted programmes & then hit the startup, this allows you to simply turn off all those programmes that run on start up & slow performance.

Thats crap cleaner!There are lots of tweaks but I will let the experts advise you there.

14 GIGS FOR NORTON?? (as stated above)

Sarah

Experts?
Hope that wasn't aimed at me?
I'd like to point out now I'm not technical. Despite what others may tell you I have a life instead

Limited HDD space will cause issues with file paging so depending on what you call nearly full, yes it could be the culprit as already pointed out. Ask yourself what you've done in the time frame it started showing symptoms though.

Ccleaner isn't something I've looked at in a while as I refrain from using products of that vein as I've seen way to many PCs turned from slow into amazingly fast. Amazingly fast to boot to a stage where they don't work at all without losing the data on them that is. If you do go that route male sure you have everything safely stored elsewhere first.

Your touchpad issue probably either needs you to check the touchpad preferences (normally a system tray icon is visible to access it) or sometimes easier to reinstall the touchpad driver (most notebook touchpads are made either Synaptics or Alps). TBH I hate touchpads and use a mouse on my notebook

As for Symantec's Norton being a system hog. Yes it has a reputation for being resource hungry, but NIS 2009 supposedly goes a long way to curing that now so maybe someone is listening after years of complaints

defrag baby

if you're running and NTFS drive, you shouldn't defrag, partly cos you shouldn't have to and partly cos you could lose data. most pc's running vista will be NTFS drives....

hey its proberly your registry thats causing the problems try glary utilities it has a number of utilities that will help