Is it time for a reformat?

[Marxist1]

Recently my Acer Aspire 5600 has been acting... for lack of a better word, "retarded." It has been really laggy in its functionality and music/video files play insanely messed up.
The audio is really distorted and choppy. The last time I had this problem (figures this isn't the first time), I simply backed up my files onto DVDs and did a restore to factory settings... though, that was back in October/November and I want to know if there is an ACTUAL solution to this problem. I've run AVG and Windows Defender, and I've defragmented my two drives, I've also even run Spybot S&D and ad-aware, but it hasn't made any difference.
On top of the audio being screwy, my computer will randomly just freeze up for about 20 seconds... even if I'm just running iTunes (and nothing else). I have used a fair bit of my harddrive space; my C drive has 11.4 gigs left, out of 43.8, and my D drive has 4.41 out of 44.3 gigs...
Is reverting to factory defaults/reformatting my only real solution?

[dcc]

It would help if you were to provide that spec for your computer, make and model, amount of RAM...

Both of your hdds are full, what is remaining is being used for swap space, if you have a insufficient amount of RAM and try to do things that are resource intensive your system will try to use the free space in you hdd to take up the slack.

I don't know what you have on those hdds, but you may want to do a little selective cleaning, and save other less often used files, picture, and movies to CDs or DVDs. Or just get a bigger hdd if you need what's on there.

[Marxist1]

I have an Acer Aspire 5600 Laptop with 1 gig of RAM and a dual core processor; 2 533 MHz processors... But if all you say I need to do is free up some space, I'm sure that's a more than feesible solution

[jkdas]

post a screenshot of your taskmanager.Check if all's ok in safe mode

[jamestomsa]

i had the same problem mate i had to clear up most of my c drive and it was still running dodgy i had 2 reformat so thats my advice