OK, here's an obvious question which typically gets the "fragmented drive and/or virus and/or too many programs running" answer.
The thing is, I'm not a dummy (I'm a software engineer, although not for PC's), and I know that none of these things are true.
I have a relatively new HP laptop running Win7 Pro SP1 (64 bit), with 4GB RAM (3.8G usable). I used to have Microsoft Security Essentials as my antivirus, but for the last year I have been using AVG Free instead.
I've had it for about 18 months, and until about 3 months ago, it was fine, but then it started running slowly. Very slow startup (10 minutes!) and then just...sluggish.
I don't have a lot of programs run on startup (and I've checked all the possible places where they could be hiding, using Sysinternals Autoruns. Process Explorer shows nothing weird - nothing is apparently using more than a percent or two. the disk is not fragmented, and it's been cleaned up.
I've done a System restore as far back as I can, and it's still slow.
My specific questions are these:
Is it possible that in my zeal to minimize cruft, I have disabled a service which is actually needed? Are there any obvious examples of services which SEEM like they are not important (either by their name or because they don't have any explicit dependencies) but which could cause slowdowns if they are turned off?
Could AVG be the main culprit? If so, why am I not seeing CPU peaks or something similar in Process Explorer?
Is there a good logging tool which I can use to try to figure out whether there is some thrashing going on or whether there are errors I can't see in the built-in windows event loggers?
FWIW, I have looked at a number of similar posts, but I've not found anything very useful...yet. If someone can point me to a great post/answer which could solve this, that would be great - I looked at 16 posts this morning.
