Sudden loss of response in all tasks

My machine is a Gateway NV58 laptop, CPU Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 2.20GHz, RAM 4Gb (2.99Gb useable), purchased 22 Dec 2009. The PC came with Operating System Windows Vista(Home Premium 32-bit) and was upgraded to Windows 7 (Home Premium 32-bit) by redemption of upgrade guarantee in January 2010. I now run Win7 (Home Premium) sp1. The 500Gb HDD has 319Gb free, 136Gb used. It will take 5 minutes to complete startup and is very slow responding to all programs (IE10, Chrome (ver 26.0.1410.64 m), Outlook 2007, Windows Explorer, Word 2007, Excel 2007, Powerpoint 2007 are the common used programs). The PC has become very slow in spite of doing Disk Cleanup and Defrag. While it was slowing in response times, between 17 April and 1 May it has dramatically worsened. On 17 April I participated in a training session for Blackboard Collaborate using IE10; response was slow but OK. Then on 1 May when we had the follow-up session the PC was extremely slow taking over 10 minutes to establish the session in IE10 including 5 minutes for the PC to startup. Nothing else had changed in the meantime apart from any Windows updates. I use Kaspersky Internet Security 2012; two days ago I ran the a Critical Areas Scan, then a Vulnerabilities Scan and finally a Full scan (which took 20 hours to complete) which was clean. I was about to upgrade to KIS ver 2013 but want to resolve this response issue first.. Your advice and help on how to restore this PC to normal response would be appreciated.

See here: How to perform a clean boot to roubleshoot a problem in Windows 8, Windows 7, or Windows Vista, see if that helps.

Thank you for that pointer; I'd forgotten all about trying that. Process followed: After normal boot, time to open Start menu, type "msconfig", tap "Enter" til Msconfig window opened = 3min34sec Time from "Restart" to boot process complete = 4min 41sec msconfig: bottom 10 services disabled (see msconfig stage 1.JPG) Time from "Restart" to boot process complete = 3min 20sec msconfig: next 5 services disabled (see msconfig stage 2.JPG) Time from "Restart" to boot process complete = 3min 20sec msconfig: next 1 service disabled (see msconfig stage 3.JPG) Time from "Restart" to boot process complete = 2min 05sec returned to normal boot in "msconfig", "OK" then clicked "Restart" Time from "Restart" to boot process complete = 4min 15sec Just now, I could not get Chrome to open at all and it took more than 5 minutes for IE to open. Once I got it open I managed to navigate to this forum and login relatively quickly. Your further advice would be appreciated.

I'm not sure where the problem is. This morning, I turned on the PC and went to do another task before starting to use it. I had forgotten to plug in the wireless mouse so turned it on and plugged in the transceiver: it took some minutes before it started to respond. In the meantime, I had a message box that neither my Windows nor Kaspersky firewall was turned on. I clicked on the message to fix it and waited some 2 minutes for it to respond with the next dialog box to turn on either firewall. (Once that initial message box was closed I could see that the Kaspersky gadget had its tick indicating that it was operating normally.) I clicked on the turn on the Kaspersky firewall and again it took about 2 minutes before that box closed. Next I clicked on the flag icon in the system tray to solve PC issues so I could use the open Action Center link to check for Windows updates. It took some 2 minutes for the Action Center window to open; I then clicked on the Windows Update link and again it took some 2 minutes for the Windows Update window to open. Then I closed that window and thought I'd time those processes. However, this time when I clicked on the Action Center flag icon the window opened immediately as did the Windows Update window. From then on the PC was responding reasonably well. Should I redo the msconfig clean boot process going down to having a single service enabled? What is the best was to know when the boot process has completed (I've been watching the icons on the desktop go from the blank boxes to their actual images and also waiting for the HDD activity light to start flashing rather than blinking so fast it appears to be solid on.)? I don't know if this sheds any light on what is going on with this PC.

Uninstall Kaspersky and test. I'm beginning to suspect it may be the cause. If so, Microsoft Security Essentials is a good alternative. Stay away from AVG, Norton or McAfee.