I am going through kinda the same thing
This laptop is slowly dying T.T the mousepad no longer works and it takes like 10 minutes to start up anymore lol

You can change RAM in your laptop pretty easy!
There's a little plate with some screws on the underside of the laptop with the RAM sticks under it.
It probably takes DDR2 1333MHz. Look at it first, it'll say.

Before you do anything run a check on your RAM by entering mdsched.exe into the start menu search to make sure it's actually your RAM. IT will restart your computer and run a check on the RAM.

It's more likely an issue with your hard drive. They get old and wear out causing slow performance because they are the only mechanical part in your computer. Have you fragmented it lately? There's checks you can do on your hard-drive too.

I hope that info helped

Thank you so much! Yeah I fragmented it just yesterday to be sure but those numbers werent bad to begin with. Ive done a massive clean up of files so far and done the clean up of the hard drive. Also run for malware and virus' and didnt come up with anything so I know thats not the cause.

I'll try to run what you suggested and see if it is the RAM or if its just the hard drive. It was a pretty cheap laptop so im sure these parts werent meant to last a whole hell of a long time.

Thank you again. good to hear some input from someone whos computer savey.