Joe O -

With 8 GB of RAM Win7 shouldn't be noticeably sluggish.

If you're being bogged down with an excess of programs that load at Startup you may want to take a look at taking some of them out of the Startup folder so that they won't load at every startup. Just because the program installer put them there doesn't mean you have to leave them in Startup. You shouldn't really have to take them off the machine just to keep them from hogging resources when you're not using them.

If your hard drive is really cramped for free space some sluggishness might happen with memory paging on the drive. General rule is that you should keep at least a third of the drive empty for "process use" but that depends some on how big the drive is.

Of course clutter that you don't need is just clutter, so keeping things clean is usually a help.

John