My brother-in-law has a cheap HP laptop used by his kids for schoolwork.

It had got into a bit of a state and was running slowly with some dubious software. I removed a bunch of stuff that had been installed, that was obviously not required (three different driver scanners!), had been downloaded in error or looked like malware.

I also disabled as many 'start on login' apps as I could and removed AVG replacing it with MSE. (AVG is uninstalled and replaced with MSE after failing to detect malware)

What remains is a significant quantity of bundled HP and 'nero backup' software, including a HP restore utility (apparently something like the osx hidden partition restore), the trackpad driver.

is there anything else I can do to breath a little more life into the old 'celeron' laptop?

Should I bit the bullet and just put win8 on it? Will the trackpad still work?