AVG running ridiculously slow

[Clockwork_Killa]

Im trying to clean up my old laptop and get it to run with reasonable speed again. I had neglected it for quite some time so it was pretty cluttered and slow.
Ive done all the obvious things, spyware scan, virus scan, uninstalled unnecessary programs etc. Ive defragged the hard drive, and even removed certain programs from startup.
What really seems to be killing it though is AVG. Ive had AVG on the machine since I got it and not had any problems, but now it seems to be ridiculously slow and its affecting the whole machine.
It runs an update at startup, but what use to only take a minute or two now takes about 10, it takes 2 whole minutes to update the files when normally it should take a few seconds. The annoying thing is, until its finished its upate process I literally cant run anything else, the whole computer just seems to lock up until AVG has finished updating.
Has anyone had this problem or got any suggestions as to how I could fix it?
Thanks

[Antagram]

You could try a trial version of Kaspersky to get a more thorough complete scan.

Also are you using version 7.x or version 8.x of the free AVG?

[Koolpc]

Maybe a format is in order?

[Clockwork_Killa]

Im using 7.5, Ill try updating to 8, might make a difference. I was rather hoping there would be an easy solution problem, but it seems its just the curse of windows striking again, guess Ill have to format

[kalniel]

I doubt it's anything specific to AVG - you're probably just going over a ram threshold or something. The new AVG is actually quite light in terms of resources (scan speed is pretty slow though).