Coming back from Operating System Decay... is there an easy way?

[rv15m]

Okay, have Windows XP Home edition here for almost 2yrs, it came with the laptop so it's a legal version. I'm not infested in any virus\trojans or banner popups. I have only one HDD 80GB, and have never reformated in those almost 2 years. I also have 512MB RAM (DDR333, 2x256MB) Athlon64 3800+. Windows is moving a bit slow... redrawing windows SLOWLY quite frequently when restoring them, minimizing them, etc. Does it sound like recommended time to do a reformat? I really don't want to have to install and reconfigure all my programs after, not that it would be hard... but updates such as those from AV and Windows Update, driver updates etc... those would be the difficult ones to all update. Is reformatting really the answer, or would any of those infamous 'clean your registy - speed up your computer' work? Oh yea, I do defragment often (more or less) using Disk Keeper, not windows defrag.

[Lespaul20]

Try using this and see if it helps

http://www.ccleaner.com/download/

[Cricket]

How much free space is on your hard drive?

Is your video card driver up to date?

What kind of background programs are running on this laptop? Are you using anything from Norton or Symantec?

Run CCleaner and it's Registry cleaner and let us know if it helped.

Adding another 512MB of RAM would be a nice upgrade.

Cricker

[rv15m]

I have around 15GB free. The video driver is up to date. It's never given problems before also. No un-necessary programs are running. Checked using HijackThis, inside the usual places in the registry, and also from the "Services and Application" section in the Computer Management applet.

I would run CCleaner, especially for the registry cleaner, that's one path that seems to have been neglected. As I have only 2 RAM slots, I'm going to take out one of the 256MB and put in a MarkVision 1GB DDR400. I hear bad reviews about MarkVision, but that's the only RAM I am getting here, along with a 1 year warranty on it.