what laptop do you have? how many running processes do you have? open task manager and look in the bottom left.
are you running any mcafee, or norton antivirus with all that spam blocking/monitoring stuff? if so disable all of that and see if that speeds things up, or better yet, uninstall all of it and use AVG.
if this is a dell run decrapifier to remove all the unnecessary crap that dell puts on there pc.
http://www.yorkspace.com/pc-de-crapifier/