My latptop is taking an age to open applications and to move from site to site

[couture1]

I have tried to download avast and avg - but keep getting stuck. All i want to do is run search for bad files and delete them.

Are you running windows? Do you have a lot of applications starting up when you turn the laptop on?

Try deleting all your internet history and cookies (in Internet Explorer, Firefox, whatever you use). Then delete all your temp windows files (disc cleanup) and do a defrag. See if that makes any difference.

Will find you a couple of links to help out

Disc cleanup

Defrag

Also suggest deleting programme that you do not need from within control panel.

When the machine is being slow press CTRL-ALT-DEL and then select Process Manager (or it might be Task Manager, on a Mac at the moment).

That will bring up a dialog showing what's running. Click on the column header labelled CPU so as to get the ones with the highest value at the top, I think this takes two clicks.

The ones with those high values will vary and fluctuate but if you can not down what they are that might tell us something...

Once you can download programs download Ad-Aware from here:
www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

That will scan for "bad" programs that might be slowing your machine down.