my windows 7 laptop has slowed to a crawl - do I need to replace it?

[Non-tech-in-a-tech-world]

I have a 3 year old Sony Vaio running Windows 7 Home Basic, with an i5 dual core processor.

Lately it has slowed to a painful crawl - takes upwards of 15 minutes just to boot up and then it's click > wait 30 - 60 seconds for it to respond > wait another 60-120 seconds or more for whatever I'm clicking to load/open. Frequent freezing is also an issue.

I don't do much more with it than surf the 'net and email, so I doubt the issue is lack of memory, either on the hard drive or RAM. I don't do photos or music at all.

I do have good virus/malware protection and nothing has been detected.

Is it just old? Broken? Ready to be recycled?

 

[TomTom5000]

It might be that your hard drive is getting cluttered, is it close to full?

 

[JochemTheGeek]

It's probably the operating system that got slow. You can try some cleaners like CCleaner, but i found that reinstalling Windows gave a real speed improvement.