Slow Performance / Memory running 80% - 90% all the time

My friend asked me to take a look at his daughter's laptop, he said it was running really slow and was blue-screening.
As a safety, I booted to safe boot and went into MSCONFIG and disabled a lot of Jun stuff (iTunes, QuickTime, Adobe, Skype and a bunch of other obvious stuff).
question #1> there are still a LOT of HP applications that are running, what else can I safely disable? (I thought about disabling everything and then enabling what I need as I go along. I think there was a USB Driver app(??), some kind of monitor and scheduling app, a WAN app and a few others)

After that, I booted normally and ran a couple trusted, cleanup apps: Ad-Aware, SuperANTISpyware, and Microsoft Security Essentials. They did find several Threats and repaired them. I rebooted and haven't noticed the Blue Screens any more, but I still think the system is running slow and the Memory is running at 80+%.

I haven't run CCleaner yet.

Any other suggestions to improve performance? The system has 3gb of RAM (I didn't check the CPU yet).

Decrapifier is free for personal use..

http://pcdecrapifier.com/

It should detect and help remove the HP installed stuff that often slows computers down. It will also open add/remove programs and let you decide if there are other installed programs that can be uninstalled but those are all dependent on whether the user still needs them or not.

3 Gigs of ram should be more than adequate unless she does a lot of photoshopping or working on video editing. Have a look in task manager/processes and see what's using a lot of memory.

Adaware isn't really of much use any longer but Malwarebytes might detect things the other scanners have missed.. www.malwarebytes.org/

Other regular maintenance like defragging would be a good idea. Is her hard drive nearly full? Which operating system is installed?

Look in Task Manager to see what's using all the ram.

Doh! didn't even think of checking Task manager.
Thanks!!

MPTech--These sites will help you determine what needs to be running at Boot and what does not.
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tuto...tup-locations/

http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_search.php

Made some good progress this weekend. After many hours of running tools and many, many reboots. The systems seems stable and much crisper. The cpu and memory usage has also reduced significantly.

First, I ran PC-Decrapifier and removed all toolbars, security programs, and any other non-essentials that were installed/running.
Then I went into MSCONFIG and disabled everything in the startup.

Then I ran full scans using:
MS Security Essentials
Malware Bytes
AdAware
Spybot Search and Destroy

all of these programs found different issues (everyone of them found at least 2 or more problems!!). Then Fixed them and rebooted again.

after this effort, I ran
CCleaner
TFC.exe
just to clean up all the temp files and such

and finally Smart Defrag 2 to defrag and re-organize everything.

The system appears to be running much better and I haven't seen any more BSODs!

At this point I feel like I'm done, but asking if there are any other clean-up / security tools I can run (I'd rather be safe than sorry).

And finally, what preventative AV / tools should be running before I return it? (I like MS-SE, is there something better or in addition? I already have the Firewall turned on too)

Firewall should absolutely be turned on. MS se is good and many here prefer it over most other a/v's.

Malwarebytes is excellent and can be installed for free and run manually every week or so or paid for and have it run in the background at all times.

A couple of freebies that won't interfere with other programs are Spywareblaster (esp effective with IEX but useful with all browsers) and WOT... Web Of Trust.. a program that lets the user know about potentially harmful websites.

Both adaware and Spybot aren't nearly as effective as they used to be years ago but probably don't cause any problems by being there.

You could also set up a new user account with non-admin privileges for her to use on a regular basis since it would be more difficult for malware to install itself on a limited user account... plus just some general safe surfing, common sense rules about computer use.
Here is some general info we pass along in the Intensive care forum about exactly that..

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic2520.html

Thanks Fink! Good advice.

yeah, I've heard AdAware and Spybot aren't as great as they used to be, but they still found a couple issues and I feel better that they were addressed.

just asking if there are any tools I missed.
(I used to always add SpywareBlaster, but didn't know if it was still popular, I'll also add WOT)

Thanks Again!

Huge step backwards! The PC was running great and no BSODs, then it started failing on every boot.

I opened a new topic, since it was kind of all new problem.
BSOD on boot

any help would be greatly appreciated (my confidence is pretty low at this point. I spent a lot of time cleaning it up, only to be worse than when I started :( )

Thanks!