How do I go about improving poor performance on my laptop?

Two things spring to mind immediately: VM and defrag. Virtual memory (if you have lots of disk space) can be increased. Go to the system settings and update that so it has tons of room. Defragmenting the drive may also improve performance (and helps your drive live longer). Check what processes are running, too. You may have tons of little 'system tray' things running, like graphics options, sound options, microphone detectors and so on. Killing lots of those will help, too, as they all take up CPU. Turn off options like file indexing, built-in messenger, printer software (other than the basic Windows stuff, of course) and any other system services you don't need. That should also help. Sounds like you're keeping things pretty clean from the internet side, though you can also reduce the length of browsing history it keeps to reduce that mess a bit. Oh, one other thing - temp files. Chances are they're in windows\temp - delete them all regularly. There will be some that it won't let you remove (usually with weird names like ~df432786.tmp), but the rest can go. Windows is absolutely terrible at cleaning up after itself... Hope it helps a little!

The same thing happens to me but it happens to our pc. It sometimes is annoying when that pop-up just shows up and warns you that your pc has low virtual memory. I usually get this warning whenever I play flash games or when I watch videos at veoh. What I do is I just restart our pc and hope that it will not pop-up again. If I do not restart our pc, after a few minutes it will hang up. When that happens, it corrupts some files especially the history section of our IE. Some cookies cannot be removed and that corrupted file takes up a very small space in our hard drive but still, it's still very annoying. What I would suggest is increase your RAM size. I think it's a solution to your problem, but there might be other ones

Hi chob! There are lots of reasons on why does a laptop slows down. It maybe either software or hardware in nature. To be more diagnostic of your problem with it, may I know how much is your RAM (not virtual memory)? Hard disk space and its free size? Anyways, Windows based computers are mostly slowing down due to low disk space, low RAM, fragmented files (which can be fixed by defragmenting it through Disk Defragmenter) and file system errors.

I would suggest tat please remove norton and go for any other antivirus. Clear the temp files by going to run and type %temp% and you will get a window. Delete all the files in it. Then again go to run and type prefetch and delete all the files in it. One more thing go to my computer properties and in that system restore point. Turn it off for the drive u r facing problem. and increase your virtual memory size and maintain atleast above 800MB space in the drives to avoid tat msg. I would suggest you to go for any Internet security like kaspersky internet security or some other for a better protection. so tat u dont need to install new antispyware or spybot. every thing is found in it