Sorry about the previous non post.  Thought I had not sent it out but.....  Read some of the posts to see if there were any ideas I could utilize and there are some very useful sounding solutions...if I understood about registry cleaners and "hijack this" forums.  I have a Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop and it is incredibly slow, say 10 minutes to start up.  There were many programs, mostly games, some of which I cannot get rid of (Backyard Hockey).  I have 6.03GB of capacity and free space of only 604MB.  But all I have remaining on the hard disk is Microsoft Office XP Front Page (506MB), Norton Internet Security (26MB), Quick Time (2MB), Spybot (13MB), and Viewpoint Media Player (7MB).Programs that I have tried to uninstall but which won't disappear are Backyard Hockey (533MB), Jacks Sport Lite (.24MB) and The Game of Life (.10MB).  When I tried to defrag, the utility told me that there is only 9% free disk space and that to run effectively I need at least 15%.  What programs or ideas should I try in order to remedy this problem.  What causes this?  Sorry about the lack of computer knowledge.  Appreciate all comments.  Looking forward to some success.

Thanks.