Laptop suddenly having terrible performances - very slow

[helpmew7]

Hello,

as of Sunday morning, my laptop has been performing terribly and running rather slow as compared to last week.

I woke up Sunday morning, played a few games and noticed a few freezes, which prompted me into restarting my laptop. I was confronted with a hanging welcome screen which lead me to booting it up on safe mode & scanning with both AVG and Malwarebytes.

Nothing was found fortunately so I booted it up normally but instead of a hanging welcome screen, there was a black screen with just a moving cursor after the login screen for about 15 minutes.

I thought I'd be fine afterwards, but my laptop was performing like it was Sunday morning. I couldn't watch a video for over 20 minutes/do anything without my browser freezing up/something later. I checked my task manager and nothing was out of ordinary - CPU usage was about 10% and physical memory was about 50-60% (basically how it normally is).

Intel Core i5 m560 2.67 GHz
Windows 7 64bit
4gb of RAM (was 2gb but I bought another 2gb stick)

-Currently scanning via Malwarebytes in normal mode-

 

[helpmew7]

Just finished an AVG and Malwarebytes full scan.

Nothing found.

 

[helpmew7]

Okay, day 3. Laptop is still slow, but not as slow, I think.. there's still some of that browser/program freezing but it doesn't last as long and just doesn't seem that major as compared to yesterday and the day before.

Also would like to add that my laptop is definitely not overheating as it's the winter and I'm here shivering each minute. I'd also like to avoid system restore as I completely forgot I had system protection disabled for a while, meaning I think I can only set it back to factory settings.

Was thinking about

• opening up my laptop and air dusting it (last air dusted this ~2 months ago)
• disk defragmenting (never tried this yet although I bought this laptop 2-3 years ago)
• harddrive firmware update? (not sure about this. There are cons and I'm unsure if I need it or not)
• wait until tomorrow to see if it improves again?

Please give me ideas!

 

[helpmew7]

Please... anyone..

Day 4 log:

• no problem logging on
• switched from firefox back to chrome, browser freezing problem noticeably improved
• played a game with no problems (even multitasked a bit) for a couple of hours
• nearing the end of my gaming, it freezes up my whole laptop, leaving me with bsod iirc
• only option for me was to a force shutdown since it was near my bedtime

Day 5 log:

• booted up laptop, bsod with various "microsoft has stopped working" messages
• booted in safe mode w/ networking, restarted in normal w/ no problems
• scanned with malwarebytes, in the midst of browsing for a couple of hours, my laptop randomly restarted itself
• came back on to type this