advice needed-a laptop

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am started trying to sort out one of the support staffs laptops last night,she said her daughter uses it as well.
very basic specs-crap hp laptop that was free with getting a contract with broadband type deal,celeron-m cpu,she said half a gig of ram,running vista basic,quite a lot of bad programs installed.

it took a long time to go from splash screen to actual desktop with everything loaded as was getting very fed up of sitting there-she didnt say how long it was.
when desktop finally loaded,with all programs,and her only browser loaded [internet explorer],it became obvious what some of the problem was-there was browser hijackers and bad tool bars installed.
got rid of those,and all the viruses,trojans etc,and changed the theme to classic windows to see if it would help it a bit in speed but it didnt,have also stopped yahoo and msn messengers starting at launch through msconfig [she wanted them to stop launching automatically anyway] and that hasn't helped,have deleted all the bad and unwanted programs,and installed firefox with adblock plus,the program deleting didnt change the loading speeds though.
the memory has been tested-no problems there [apart from lack of it].

-so it's still extremely slow,
am wondering if it could be the hard drive that is starting to die-as everything is being read extremely slow? it's not doing any strong clicking noises.
or...do these signs sound like overheating in any way? the fans seemed to be on almost constant full effort,and the part below the tracking pad felt almost too hot to touch-have used many laptops and never one as hot as that,no matter how long they're left on.
would a format and reinstall be worth trying?



thanks--

my asus laptop had a similar problem, part of it was the antivirus software was too slow and causing more problems than it solved. the other problem was the software for the track pad, it would make the computer run very slow especially when scrolling through long web pages. what i did was install the track pad driver software made by the company that made the track pad (synaptics), instead of the drivers from the maker of the computer (asus). the synaptics drivers were more up to date and solved the slow scrolling problem.

Go into Services and gut it. Half a gig of RAM running Vista won't be pretty no matter how you do it. Get Firefox or Opera or something like that, and get IE out of the Start menu so they don't use it- it'll just bring in more malware. Defragging the hard drive and running CCleaner might help.

Aside from that, my recommendation would be to install Xubuntu on the box, but from what you've said I'm guessing this person has no interest in trying to run any flavor of Linux. XP would be fine on that machine if they have a copy; with Vista they'll have to deal with it always being slow.

I'd NEVER run an operating system on the minimum requirements. Time to upgrade to XP I think Only needs 64MB RAM and 256MB RAM to run smoothly for everyday use