Argthtjtr

I have an older Sony Vaio Windows 7 laptop and it has been running quite well up until recently. It all of a sudden started running extremely slow and the hard drive seems to be constantly running. I have tried some things I have seen in forums such as Malwarebytes but not really much change. I use this laptop for work and there are a variety of reasons why I want it to work properly rather than getting a new laptop so any help is appreciated in getting it back to normal again.

A couple of days ago I got the hard drive to somehow stop and work more or less normally but after restart went back to running all the time. I am thinking there is Malware in there but it has been hard to really scan well as it runs so slow. Mixed performance in safe mode as well. It also operates somewhat better when not connected to the internet which is one reason I think it may be Malware.

I should also note that this laptop is really used for work only. Not for surfing the internet and such. I have other devices I use for that.

This question is, unfortunately, slightly too vague. I say unfortunate because I recognize your efforts to provide details. The heavy hard drive usage is probably causing the slowness. You'll need to figure out what software is causing that. Chances are quite good it is your RAM filled (and so Windows using the hard drive for virtual memory), so the root cause of the problem might be a program causing too much RAM to be used. When RAM is used up, and virtual memory is used, and the hard drive is heavily used, and the system is slow (all of those things happening, in that order, because of the prior item in that list), this is commonly called "thrashing" the hard drive. Your friends for this might be Task Manager (Press Ctrl-Alt-Del) and closing programs, or running MSConfig and unchecking optional stuff on Startup tab.

Don't be afraid to try turning off anti-virus. (You may want to ensure you are disconnected from the Internet, or any network really, until you try turning it back on.) See if that causes the hard drive "thrashing" to cease. (Then, don't forget to re-enable anti-virus protection.) If the anti-virus software is the cause, then you may try either adjusting some settings in that software, or using a different anti-virus solution.

Other than that, what is preventing me from providing more specifics is that we don't have a specific list of what software you're using. Those are the details needed for someone to be able to help much more.

I had the same problem. Had been using my laptop for years, then one day it just started running super slow to do anything like open a document or bring up internet or bring up desktop. Tried several different things including virus and malware checking. Tried several diagnostic tools. I even tried turning off indexing. Monitors did not show any processes running excessively. I did notice a disc error flashing by on boot up just before this problem started.
Here is my final solution:

I ran chkdsk /f /r.

I did this from cmd line. It told me it couldn't run while programs were running and would start once the system was restarted. So I restarted the system and sure enough, chkdsk /f /r started running on bootup.
As it ran it listed a lot of disc problem and errors and corruptions. 
Because of the /f and /r modifiers it fixed the problems as it went along. 
If you run chkdsk without the /f and /r modifiers,
it only looks for errors but it won't try to fix anything.
Once it was finished, the system rebooted, loaded Windows, and the problem was gone.

Hope this helps someone.