What should i do to make my laptop work faster?

my laptop has so much free disk space left; i don't understand why it lags. i have recently installed new programs (antivirus and codec), does this have something to do with my problem?

What should i do to make my laptop work faster?norton antivirus

My guess is that you've bought a new laptop that has Vista installed and 1GB or less of RAM.

I'd say the minimum requirements for RAM would be 2GB to let Vista run efficiently. The operating system foot print takes up about 760MB of RAM by itself.

1GB = 1024MB

Long story short...your CPU can only process information that resides within the RAM. Therefore, whenever you switch programs or open new ones, the information in your RAM is dumped onto free space on your hard drive referred to as a page file to make room for more files. Then, whenever referencing program files that have been dumped to the page file on the hard drive, it has to load those files back into the RAM. Therefore, more RAM = less references to the hard drive's page file.

You can imagine that the CPU does this over and over until all actions initiated by the user are finished.

The addition of your anti-virus just adds to the size of your Vista footprint on the memory sub-system, forcing more caching to the page file. You should just buy more DDR2-667MHz RAM to solve the issue or learn a bit more about hardware and software so that you can remove unnecessary background programs or services and stream line the Vista OS with the hardware that already exists.