Does my laptop have one foot in the grave? (aka; probably a dumb question)

I recently had to reformat my laptop after it caught a nasty virus. Ever since then, I'm noticing that the processor seems to be running hotter, and my Internet browser freezes up frequently. I notice it most when I'm typing in a message field; the typing sporadically halts for a few seconds, and then catches up. (I'm using Firefox now, rather than Internet Explorer, if it helps)

I do remember that when I initially got the laptop, my boyfriend took a bunch of programs off of it, like stuff that came with it. Since that stuff is back on it now, could it account for why it's running hotter and freezing up now? Or is it more likely that there's been some permanent damage?

If it's an old laptop, there could be something to your idea. The more things going on at the same time, the more CPU usage. If the memory is limited it will keep paging to the hard drive. That may be why he removed some of the software. The symptom of that would be the hard drive running almost all of the time.

If you're running Windows, load Windows Explorer, click on Help/About at the top and it will show how much physical memory it has. The later the version of Windows you're running, the more RAM you need. You may be able to get by with a memory upgrade.