Extremely slow-lots of issues-need help!

Hello all. I bought a Dell Inspiron laptop about 6 months ago. It has been great, no problems. A couple of weeks ago it went to a blank screen after sitting for a while as normal, but not all the way to sleep. When I tried to use it it wouldn't come back up. After trying everything I had to just turn it off via the power button. When it re-booted it was EXTREMELY slow and in fact never got past the windows login screen. After a few attempts I just left it for a while while starting up. It now will boot up and log in, but it takes about 20 minutes or more.

At first, it wouldn't connect to the internet so I re-installed the network adaptor driver and that fixed that problem. But windows still operated very slowly. Once fully logged in the computer operated pretty normally except that McAfee said it wasn't protecting my computer and it won't change. I tried downloading and running Malwarebytes and it took so long that I eventually had to go to bed and when I tried to bring it back to life the next day it was frozen. I tried to run it again and it won't run Malwarebytes.

I have searched for a soluting to this everywhere and can't begin to figure out how to fix it. ANY help would be appreciated. I am running windows 7 home premium. Thanks in advance...

No restore points...I will try using another computer to do that.

I tried booting from CD and when I try to hit F12 to do so it basically just freezes. Any other ideas?

Is everything starting up ok? I've had a bad sector at some point come up and my laptop took about the same length of time to start up.

In my case the problem was AVG was installed on a bad sector of the HDD. this held everything back. even after loggin on still had to wait about another 10-15 min before it finally gave up starting a component of AVG.

Done a chkdsk on boot, which told me about the bad sector for a program in the AVG dir. uninstalled it, reinstalled it. CHKDSK marked the bad sector so any new installs didn't come back in it.
Hope this helps you

First, back up all of your data. As soon as you recognize an issue with your computer, regardless of what it is, you should back up your data manually onto an external HDD or your most important data only onto a flashdrive.

You can try a System Restore first. If that doesn't work, I'd suggest completely wiping the system from the HDD and starting over clean. If, after you reinstall the system (NOT reimage), it is still buggy, I would bet that your problem has to do with a hardware failure of some sort. If the OS reinstalls perfectly without any trouble (and the HDD light is flashing during install), then it's probably not the HDD. At this point, you can be pretty sure it's a motherboard issue. In that case, send it out for repair as it could be a blown capacitor or faulty electrical rigging (sometimes components on the motherboard just blow out, usually due to power fluctuations).

Just a side note: as far as I know, Dell uses various parts from different manufacturers within the product lines of their computers. For example, if you have two exact Dell Inspirons with the same model number, you can bet both of them have different components in them (i.e. two different manufacturers of the motherboards).

Go through these troubleshooting steps after backing up your files.

If your HD tests OK but you can't find the problem, then if you want to try to save the current installation consider running a Repair Install using a Win7 Installation DVD for your version,

or run Dell Factory Recovery partition Restoring Your Computer´s Software to the Factory Settings | Dell

or re-install windows 7

Sorry, I have been busy and have limited time to work on this. I have tried using Kapersky and BitDefender to boot from CD and both have failed to be able to actually run a scan. Neither worked. I tried both of them twice. I appreciate all of the other suggestions. I will give them a try tomorrow and post results, if any.