Hard drive is slow

Hey y'all. I've got a weird problem I haven't been able to solve for over a year now. I've had my laptop for two years now - an averatec C3500, also known as a-piece-of-crap-with-serious-display-issues. Regardless - and the laptop takes 20~30 seconds to load the list of files whenever I try to browse my files through the smaller "Open.." window.

Like, explorer (My Computer, My Documents, C:, etc) shows me what files I have very quickly when I'm browsing my files, but when I'm trying to post an image reply to someone on 4chan and click the "browse" button to find my image, the little window freezes for about half a minute the first time I use it in the application.

I'm pretty certain this is not a malware or virus issue (I scanned my computer with adaware, spybot, and bazooka and nothing fishy came up except a few internet cookies. hijackthis doesn't point out anything odd either.) but that it may have something to do with windows itself or my hardware (do hard drives slow down over time?).

I did use this laptop to game a little (stopped when summer came because it was too hot) and torrent a few dozen GB of data (which is no longer on the laptop -- the hard drive is only 24GB out of 80GB full.) It's got a gig of RAM, Mobile AMD Athlon 2200+ (1.67GHZ), and windows tablet edition SP2 (== windows home edition sp2)

Defrag

defraged several times -- didn't help.

Laptop HDDs are 5400rpm generall.

How much crap is running in the background?

How much shit is on your desktop?

LRN2GOOGLE!

There's nothing but two icons on my desktop usually (my docs and recycle), and I only let the tablet driver and anti-virus load when windows starts. I have not noticed my RAM or processing power peak during these freezes

Kill your icon cache.  Then kill yourself.

I cleared it, and it's still slow

Install Windows 2K if XP is too slow for you on that hardware.

Also: kill yourself.

>>8
You didn't read my original post at all

Delete all your CP, problem solved.

>>1
It's always slow, but this may help:
1. Delete icon cache
2. Get rid of system tray bullshit, why do you want all that shit anyways?
3. Get SysInternals' Autoruns and disable Explorer/shell extensions you don't need or want, as well as most or all third party crap you don't know about.
4. Be sure you don't have any malware, never use Internet Explorer, etc.