Speeding up slow laptop [closed]

Question

I have (well, it's actually my mother's) a laptop that's running slowly. It has 2 GiBs of RAM, AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-58 processor, GeForce 7000 integrated card on nForce 610M. It's running Vi$ta Ultimate SP2 32bit. OS installation is about 3 years old.

Here are my problems: It's a company's laptop. It has lots of data, mostly contacts from Outlook 2007 and archived mails I really don't want to lose. On company's lan there are about 7-8 printers and each one of them comes with its own crapware driver and "helpful utilities". There's also OneNote 2007 startup item, GoogleTalk mail notifier, Skype, Cisco VPN program, Nokia OVI and some small stuff I forgot about. Opening Outlook 2007 (the main program used for business!) for example takes about 5 minutes. Cores don't get over 10% activity at most during that time. There is a lot of hard disk activity during that time.

Here are my ideas for speeding up the computer and what I've done so far:
The most obvious way would be to get company's IT staff to fix the problem, but the IT guy and his junior assistant are real-life versions of Bastard Operator From Hell and Pimply-Faced Youth (I don't think they've killed anybody yet, but I could be wrong :)) and their answers to problems are something like: "Q:This brand new computer doesn't have any easily-accessible USB ports! How am I going to plug my flash drive into it? A:Well it has a functioning floppy drive. There must be a program somewhere on Internet which will split your 400MiB file into floppy sized chunks. I'm sure you'll find it." so I can't rely on them for any help.
I removed all except what I listed above from startup. Unfortunately, the long list is really needed. I run CCleaner and Soluto and removed what I could. I defragmented hard disk and made sure that swap file has one fragment. I deleted all temporary files which CCleaner may have missed. Is there any other good junk-removing program I could try?
Next I thought about reinstalling OS. The system partition is about 100 GiBs in size and has about 20 GiB free. The funny thing is that the business data is about 10 GiB and the rest I was unable to identify. I'm considering at this point reinstalling Vi$ta or moving to windows 7, probably 64bit. Which one would be better choice? All software used works fine on both vista and seven and 64bit version of Cisco VPN seems to work fine.
I've also considered adding more RAM. Video card takes 256MiB for its use. I've been thinking about putting 4GiBs in the laptop. Would it be really worth the trouble? To me this was the obvious first step, but there's to company side to consider. The laptop worked fine when it was new with just 1792MiB of RAM available to system.

For the end, I did think about posting this as several separate questions, but then I'd have to reference the backstory in each one, so I decided to post it as one.

Answer 1

Try TuneUp Utilities. They've got a fully functional 30-day trial. It helped me a lot of times.

I would use the Utilities in this order:

1. Make a backup. I never had problems with TuneUp, but you'll never know!
2. Free disk space by deleting files and programs you really don't need. And don't think i might need this later. If you are not so sure if you should delete a file: Do it - you have a backup!
3. Run 1-click-maintenance
4. Repeat this step until no more problems are found.
5. Defragment the disk
6. Run the performance assistant
7. Defragment Registry

When everything is cleaned up i strongly recomment installing PageDefrag (from Microsoft) and set it up to run at every boot. I defragments your pagefile and the registry at every boot. The first time it'll take a lot of time, but after that it usually just takes 2-20 secs at boot. It's worth it! But be sure to have a few GBs of free and unfragmented space where the pagefile might fit into, before running PageDefrag the first time!

Answer 2

I would imagine that Outlook is using a PST file to store its e-mail. You might want to look into archiving some of that e-mail to reduce the size of the PST file, thus making it load faster.

You only say how slow Outlook is to load, nothing about how slow the OS is to boot or any other programs. To see what is taking up the space I would suggest WinDirStat to get a picture of the Hard drive. Since you have done just about everything else to speed it up I would recommend a backup and re-install of the OS. Vista SP2 is just fine and if that is what came with the laptop that is what I would use.

As for the Splitting 400MB to floppy, that is is 278 floppies, which is not practical. I wouldn't add any RAM to a computer that isn't owned by me or my family. That is asking for a sticky situation.

P.S.: As a SysAdmin for a company, if one of the employees had their son/daughter fix a computer and didn't ask me for help, go to my boss, I would have them written up / fired, but that is just me.