If your system has been infected by a virus or malware, restoring to original defaults may be your only choice. There is software that you can buy or download for free from reputable sites that will help you, but some junk programs manage to linger on forever, or until the disk is wiped.

If you need to restore:

Off load all of your important stuff you want to keep onto a usb flash drive or copy the files to a cd or dvd, if you have a cdrw or dvd rw drive in the laptop.

Once you have saved all of your important stuff. Use your restore disks to restore the harddrive to factory defaults and to wipe the drive. The restore disks will also reload your windows o/s.

If that cure's most of your slownest, then upgrade your ram to the full 2 gigs.

Once you have done that, you can then add back any of the software that you installed (the stuff that did not come with it) after you purchased the machine (like MS Office, etc) and then all of the files you saved on the cd/dvd/usb flash drive.

I will be doing the above to my daughter's Sony laptop next week because she has allowed it to get all crudded up with junk.

If your o/s is Vista, you will be much better off running the maximum amount of RAM. It is relatively easy to install, even on a laptop. And the price stated by Robot is excellent. My vendor charges about $10 more per stick.