Windows 7 very slow start up and sluggish general performance

Thanks very much - I'll give it a go this evening...

And yes, I ran Avast and Malwarebytes and both came up empty...

Ran a sfc/scannow - no irregularities found
Also reset hibernation, but no luck with that either...

The machine is still under warranty so I guess I'll have to take it back to the reseller - it's just that the idea of not having my laptop for what I assume will be a fair amount of time is not very appealing...

Thanks for your suggestions regardless...

jeffmo,
Exchanging the machine is certainly not a bad idea and I would probably go that route myself. Here is something to keep in mind if you feel like you need another project to soak up some more time. I have had a few cases where a hard drive will cause a system to bog down similar to what you are describing. In my cases the drive passed even the extended testing and no errors were found in the event viewer. I suspect the reason for this apparent conflict is that the testing programs are looking for defects on the platter and defects that otherwise result in errors. Some hard drive defects are due to the electronics in the drive and the result is that the drive simply becomes unavailable periodically but does not generate read or write errors. That can bog things down pretty seriously while still passing extended testing. In the most recent case, the drive was tested multiple times and always passes all tests. When all else failed I was still suspicious of the hard drive (why is a long story). I used windows 7 back up to create an image of the hard drive on an external drive. Then I installed an older but known good drive in the computer and restored the image to that drive. This solved the problem without losing any programs or functionality. Only the hard drive was changed. It may still be best to return the machine especially if it has a bad drive. I just wanted to point this out if only to complete the picture. Good luck!

Hi Tweakit - thanks so much for your response. It is a very strange issue indeed. I'm not quite sure that I trust myself enough with swapping hard drives in the machine as you've suggested - sounds like a good option, but I guess I should check what my warranty covers first.
I do appreciate your time though, so thanks again for the info you've provided.

Cheers.