Ok so I got this Acer laptop for Christmas last year, and up  until a few weeks ago, it worked fine. I could watch movies and listen to music and surf the web on it just fine, with no snags and freezes. Lately though, I can't even get through a song without the cpu usage going through the roof, and the sound gets all distorted and laggy and choppy. Same goes with dvds and video files, they get laggy. And lately, even my everyday web surfing is horrendous. I've run spyware and anti-virus programs and they come back with nothing.

The specs:

AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core processor TK-53 (1.7ghz)
64mb Nvidia GeForce 7000M turbocache (onboard video)
1GB DDR2 ram
160 gb HDD (around 17 gb remaining)

Can someone please help me? Formatting the computer and reinstalling windows is not an option.

You also have not much free space on your hard disk, and this might be a problem. Not necessarily the amount of free space, but the amount you've used. You probably have lots of files, and movement can cause fragmentation of the hard disk. This can be overcome by using a free disk defragmenter (like the one that comes with Windows - It's in the Admistrative Tools folder). This can increase the speed that software loads at, though probably not by that much.

Another factor can be the time you've had the laptop for. It can be found with Windows that 6 months to a year after installing Windows, it can begin to slow down. This is just because people install and remove software so many times that parts can still remain, and there will be so many unneeded services running that use up considerable CPU power.

Sadly the fix to that would be to reinstall Windows. It does delete all the stuff on your hard drive, so you'd need to back up. You said this wasn't an option, but I'd still strongly consider it, it's what works best.

Second to reinstalling Windows you can always just check the list of Services running on Windows (Services program in the Administrative Tools folder) and stop any that you can clearly identify as not being needed for you (also set to manual start so that it doesn't restart once you've restarted your computer). This is also helpful, but it's sometimes hard to find out what is needed and what isn't. You don't want to stop something Windows critical from running, or something like an anti-virus application.

I hope this has helped, but I still maintain that reinstalling Windows is the simplest and safest process. It's especially difficult for someone that doesn't know exactly what they're doing to mess with the Windows Services.

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and victorious in war shall be made glorious in peace.