Laptop becoming nearly useless

Here goes another annoying tech question:
For the past three months, my laptop has been show as fucked fuck. It's a Vaio with an 1.7 Pentium M and a gig of ram. I've already done the standard slow down check-list of spyware check, virus scan, HDD defrag, HDD diagnostic, RAM diagnostic, removed bloat from registry, slimmed down process list, CCleaner'd, and made sure that the CPU power management settings didn't get changed somehow. I tried doing XP's system restore but it didn't have any restore points saved from before the computer started acting up.

SO, I'm about to wipe everything and restore it to factory out-of-the-box setting (Nuke it from orbit.. It's the only way to be sure). Before I do this, any ideas?

Oh yeah, It's been struggling to run firefox and utorrent at the same time. It seems like the most basic shit it maxing out the processor.

ya, nuke it, and rebuild.
its not only fun, but its refreshing not to have a bunch of shit on a computer.
thank goodness for external hard drives though. my computer was getting near crashing point, so i bought one, put all my poop on it (literally, i put my information on it, and then shat on it) and what do you know, a week later it started acting up.

>ya, nuke it, and rebuild.
You should do it every 6 months anyway

>>4
Lol Windows.


 22:43:50 up 286 days, 19:33,  14 users,  load average: 58.21, 44.18, 37.11

>>6
Quit running SETI or whatever it is on your server.

Oh, and enjoy your vmsplice vulnerability.

>>5
Should pretty much do that with any home computer, regardless of OS.

>>8
Why? One of my home computers has been running for over 4 years now. Almost 24/7. It's running damn fine, just as good as back when I set it up. You just need a real operating system and know how to take care of it.

>>9 see >>7

Replace your hard drive.  They only last three years nowadays before they start to fail.

>>11
>>already done HDD diagnostic

>>10
Well, >>7 and >>9 was both posted by myself. And by vmsplice vulnerability I meant that he should upgrade his kernel and reboot. Which takes maybe 4-6 minutes time. How is that related to reinstalling a crappy OS that doesn't even manage to stay up 286 days straight?

Reinstall the OS from scratch.

When installing, format the drive and enable check for bad blocks.

(it also won't hurt to install a better OS, and by better OS I don't mean Vista)

OP here.
Update: Nuked, Paved, Problem Solved.
I just wanted to wait until finals were over just in case something seriously retarded were to happen during the wipe.