Lee,
A number of things that slow down a PC regardless of how good it is
1) Installing new drivers that are optimized for a different operating system. Right now Win10 is the latest. If you are running win7 (which is much better) your laptop will slow. Microsoft almost does it intentionally to get you to upgrade
2) Anti Virus and blocker SW. It's great but it makes everything slow. You are better to setup the SW to run at night or something than setup for host intrusion. Host intrusion checks every file all the time and therefore makes things slow
3) use a disk utility to defrag your disk. Data is not stored contiguously on a disk drive. It's stored where ever there is room which means that the disk is seeking the data all the time. That's why SSD are better because the access time is faster. However if you defrag and make the data more or less contiguous it improves performance. You would see that as your computer gets older because you have put more data on the disk so it's harder to find contiguous sectors. Think of it has having each ingredient for a recepy store on a different room and trying to cook compared to everything stored in the fridge. If you were to cook the same thing, it would faster with the fridge
4) run the task managed (cntl + alt + del) and have a look at what uses up your CPU %. See if the process makes sense or if it's some Bullshit driver that was installed without you knowing and it will slow down the machine. Especially some of (diddums freeware, sorry Dave but some of your suggestions have made me reinstall the operating system, that talking application for example).
5) Finally make sure you run an Intel CPU, none of that AMD shit that Rob wants people to buy