What are the basic programs on windows 7 (programs included in OS)?

Well Kris, those that came preinstalled from the factory/refurbisher can be found and saved by creating a set of Recovery Media unless it has already been done and you did not get them. You can back everything up to a flash drive or two if you want to preserve what you have now. With a set of Recovery Media you would be able to replace the hard drive with one of the same size or larger and best if it spins at 7200rpm. Then you would load the Recovery Media to start with the computer in a new state, not bogged down with a lot of software you don't need. This computer has 120 software titles of which 31 are Microsoft(no Office or related), it has 19 HP titles and after that several Cyberlink, Adobe, Apple, Divx, Malwarebytes,CCleaner, Hitman Pro, Libre Office and more. Any titles that I don't use on a regular basis I keep disabled so that they do not start at Start Up and they are not running in the background doing nothing except wasting resources.

Anything not Microsoft isn't necessary to operate the computer, Ralink or similar maybe used for wireless internet and maybe Realtek or similar for sound and drivers for graphics.

With the Recovery Media I created when the hard drive died I was able to put in a new hard drive, load the recovery media using 5 dvd and I was still up and running in 20 minutes.

Good Luck and be careful what you dump, never dump anything you don't know what it is or does.

It depends on what the error message says. I think you need to uninstall unnecessary programs anyway. Click on start, go to control panel, make sure you view by small icons on the upper right, click on programs and features. Now any program that isn't microsoft in the publishers column can be uninstalled by you own discretion. Most are probably useless unless you recognize them to be useful. Besides that, there are other things that can cause a pc to run slow; malware, viruses, registry issues, not enough ram, too many useless services running in the backround, too many startup items in the system tray and on startup, and the worse, rootkits. If you mess up you can roll back by using system repair by pressing F8 before win7 boots to do a system restore.