Laptop running slow!

I do not know too much about computers so hopefully someone might have an answer for this. My uncle purchased a Toshiba Satellite laptop for me about a year ago. About 3 months ago orange juice was spilled on it and the harddrive was ruined. Ive recently replaced the old harddrive with a larger one. Im finding now that it is running slower than it was before. Any ideas would be very appreciated. One other thing. I'm pretty sure I got ripped off by the guy that installed my harddrive. I was charged $70 for the installation fee. Is that commen?

Hi Sjlsammy… Welcome to WhatTheTech.. Sorry about the long response time.

$70 to install a hard drive sounds reasonable if they had to reload all your software on it. It really depends on what "installing a new hard drive" entailed. Did they reload the O/S and software, did they transfer data from the old drive and have to recover data? Anyways, without knowing what they did its hard to say what is a reasonable fee. The time to "install a hard drive" takes about 5 minutes.

Anyways, please read http://forums.whatthetech.com/Welcome_new_users_t104737.html and post back with the additional information we need in order to make informed decisions on your computer.

Hello. I am not a techie but here are a few utilities that may help improve the speed of your machine.
http://www.windowsstartup.com/download.php
http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download
http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download
http://www.ccleaner.com/
all the software programs are defraggers and will not intrude on the registry. With the ccleaner do not under any circumstances use the registry cleaning facility.

Hello. I would not and never posted a registry cleaner. The software posted are defraggers.

Thanks Maco, I jumped the gun on that one. Glad you got my PM'd apology. Feel free to edit the post I edited and put the link back if you want. I promise I'll leave it alone this time

Hello ztrucker. An apology is unnecessary I am just a beginner You are the expert and I would always be guided by those in the know.