If anyone could help I would greatly appreciate it! My laptop has been very messed up for some time now- takes forever to start up, is VERY slow, the C drive constantly fills up so I have to do a disk cleanup many times while I am using it to clear space... Symantec is not finding anything when I run scans... Is there anything else I can do?
Your laptop should have a built in recover when booting, perhaps F3. In any event, I would suggest you place your photos, important docs, etc on a flash drive and then recover by placing the computer back to where it came out of the box.
This will wipe your hard drive and you'll think you just bought a brand new laptop.
It would also be useful to know some hardware details: make and model of the computer, year you bought it, hard drive size, amount of RAM, processor speed. To help evaluate whether these problems may just be caused by a computer that's being pushed to its limits just running today's software in the first place.