Is there any way I can make my slow laptop usable again?

This is kind of a scorched earth approach but it’s what I do, rather than kind of nickel and dime the thing with clean up programs and tweaks. And it’s a major pain in the ass because you have to reload all your applications and set everything up again but… back up and/or transfer your data to disks or an external hard drive then reformat the thing or run the recovery disks. It should run pretty well after that. Works for me, but like I said, kind of a scorched earth approach, not for everyone.

The B120 is pretty old. If I have my specs right, it is about four years old and two generations behind current technology. Add to that the fact that the Celeron was a slow budget CPU to begin with and I can understand perfectly well why it would be slow with modern software designed for more powerful, more modern machines. Your machine is comparable to a modern netbook like the Acer Aspire One, a machine renowned for being slow and weak. (According to PassMark, your CPU really is comparable to an Atom N270!)

Still, my old Netbook was a bit quicker than that. Of course, the reason it was quicker is that it had four times the RAM of a stock B120 (1GB versus 256MB) which meant that it could run programs from RAM instead of having to use part of the hard drive as memory; hard drives are (literally) 1,000 times slower than actual RAM. And just so you know, you really can’t run any software made in the last decade (like WinXP, Vista, or Win7, even without adding apps on top of that) with anything approaching speed on less than 1GB of RAM.

Realistically, the only cost-effective way to solve your problem is replacing the whole thing with something made in the last couple of years. Pretty much anything made right now is better than the B120 as far as speed, capacity, battery life, or portability go, and some of them are cheaper than any upgrade for your old B120 is.

You could wipe it out and install an older version of Linux instead of Windows, since Linux runs better on older, slower hardware than Windows. But that might be a little beyond your skill level as you would also have to use OpenOffice instead of Word (though OO can read/write Word files)

Sometimes you just have to cut your losses.

Install Linux.

If you were happy with how it was and you have back-ups it is time to format and reinstall. I would suggest finding a copy of XP that is straight from Microsoft. The one Dell should have sent with the computer is loaded with crapware. A copy of XP is super cheap on eBay or Craigslist. I even have a spare I could mail you.

Granted, the computer is a bit long in the tooth but a nuke and pave will clean it up a lot.

Defrag? I know it’s so obvious as to probably not require mentioning, but it always helps my netbook and some people just go for a long time without doing it.

Download these two programs:

CCleaner: http://filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/
Defraggler: http://filehippo.com/download_defraggler

Run them both. Make sure you also scan for corrupted or unnecessary registry entries with CCleaner. This should give your system a good boost.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty old. The only thing I can suggest is install Linux (like PuppyLinux, runs great on old hardware), but that’s still only for power users that only expect to use it as a web browser.