Pentium M CHUG-A-LUG LUG

Hey folks, just wanted to come to you with a bit of a conundrum that I have. I have a HP Pavillion DV1000 that is about 7 years old that I recently aquired from my aunt. The specs are as follows:

1.6ghz Pentium M
2GB Ram
Intel Integrated Graphics
Win XP Home Ed. 32-bit

Now, I don't know whether or not it's me or that the Pentium M seems to be getting a little aged, but for all that it's worth, it constantly chugs along and struggles with just about everything that I throw at it. Now, I can understand the gaming side of things because the hopeless onboard graphics are just plain atrocious, but even with Mozilla Firefox the Pentium M just flat out falls on it's back. Even at idle, I seem to be using way more of the CPU then I should. At first, I thought that AVG may be the culprit because the Identity Protection process was an outright hog. So I turned that off, hoping to see an improvement. Come to find out, that helped only marginally. I then downloaded "Game Booster", which disables unnessecary processes and scrubs a bit of RAM. Even though it is meant for gaming, it still helps out a bit but the Pentium M still struggled mightily when under load.

I know that RAM is not an issue; 2GB is plenty enough for Windows XP and I spoil my computer my defragging and running CCleaner every night so one cannot say that a cleanup would help out much. Now, I realize that the DV1000 is past it's prime and I'm hoping to put it out to pasture and build myself a brand new, state of the art gaming rig in August. I previously had a 2.8ghz Pentium 4 desktop with 2GB of RAM an 8800GT video card, and taking gaming out of the equasion, that P4 Prescott could really scoot along while browsing the internet and could even do some light-duty video editing. The Pentium M is supossed to be a much more efficient CPU but I can't undestand for the love of god why in the world this thing is in a completely different league than that P4, and I'm not talking about that in a good way.

With that said, am I just expecting a bit much from the little bugger, or is this just plain odd? Anyone know of why the Pentium M is just dreadfully slow? I'm dumbfounded.

Re-install Windows, system will be fine as long as you don't install a bunch of junk on it. Why would you defreag and run registry cleaners every day? You're just asking to break something that way.

New hard-drive would also help, if the drive has issues it can rally slow down the system.