Disabled programs at Startup - broke my computer

Question

So my Vista laptop is painfully slow. It's about 5 years old now, a Toshiba satellite with Vista Home Premium. It's due for a clean up. I can't afford a new laptop, so I run all my adobe programs through here.

What I did: Ran disk defrag, cleanup, etc. Opened msconfig and on startup disabled what I thought were non-critical programs - Adobe, Apple (Itunes and Quicktime), Spybot, etc. I left all Microsoft and Toshiba programs running.

This broke my computer and I spent the last three days getting it back to it's painfully slow self (entered safe mode, enabled all programs at startup, ran chkdsk, and can now log in as normal). Or so I thought. It's slower than ever. It just booted, I logged in, and here we are 10 minutes later and I still can't click on a single thing. Last night I logged in, tried to click the start menu, and it hung up for 2 hours before I just shut it down to try again today.

What am I to do?

TIA

Answer 1

I think the reason it's running "slower than ever" is because initially not all the programs were enabled at startup, but after you seem to have 'broke' your computer, you enabled ALL the startup programs instead.

Would be nice if you posted the specifications of your computer. If it's decent and your applications are not so heavy on your computer then I might suspect that your computer might be infected.

Also I don't see how disabling the startup of the programs you listed would break your computer. Could you describe what breaking your computer means?