Just thought I would put this out there. If your not using internet explorer as your browser and you find your windows 7 running a bit laggy consider uninstalling the latest version of internet explorer 11 and go back to 8. My hubby and myself have been finding things a bit laggy and have been doing some reading. He found a few places saying that IE 11 can cause some lagging down of windows 7 in places. I just uninstalled and so far everything is loading much much quicker.
I was beginning to wonder if I had to reformat which is a huge pain in the ass and I hate doing since I have so much to re install and update(thank goodness for portable hard drives to back stuff up on) Thankfully it was just a simple uninstall of something I don't use anyway. whee :)
This might not work for every one but I thought I would mention it in case it could help someone.
IE 11 is a mess for a lot of reasons, so uninstalling it (which I've done) makes a lot of sense.
I would offer you two thoughts, however.
1. If you have automatic updates, Microsoft may simply reinstall it with your monthly important updates, unless you use this tool:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=407222. While IE11 is problematic, IE10 is not, and offers a lot of improvements over earlier versions (including IE8, to which you apparently reverted). If you have Windows 7 and use IE, I would suggest trying IE10. It works very well for me.