davidk2020 Loc: San Diego

First and most important: get rid of all the Norton software. You'll have to go to the Norton web site and download a special program to remove all traces of their junk from your machine. At least that's free.

Uninstall any other crapware that came with the machine.

Finally, it would be nice to replace that slow hard drive with an SSD drive and an external USB 3 drive for backup. The easiest way to migrate to an SSD is to get one that's the same capacity as your hard drive, but with a 750 GB drive that might not be feasible.

bobsworld Loc: Rocky Mount VA

I second the Norton removal, have had to fix many software level problems due to Norton, too many free options out there that do not cost anything. But off topic a little. Lots of good options for the OP. They all in their own right can speed you up a fraction, of course the reformat being the one that gets the more bang.
I would go for the cheap and effective route first but that is me, Msconfig and shutdown some of your startups like was already suggested. Leave the microsoft stuff alone. And if your main drive is nearly full, you definitely will want to offload some to another drive, I have seen computers slow down when at the threshhold. I have not looked up your laptop but does it have the option for another internal drive? This might be an option, and easy to install. I know one Dv7 I was working on had a main hdd and a slave hdd. Although 6gb ram is great, you can always use more, I always ask, it was fast when you first got it right? For picture editing my desktop machine is running 16gb and a 6 core amd. Should of went 32gb. But it was fast when I first built it.
You also might want to run a good registry cleaner/defragmenter and also after you move out some files from your main drive that you can archive defrag the drive, it might not need it but check anyhow. CC cleaner works well for all of this, it sets a backup of your registry in case something goes terribly wrong you can put it back. There are so many preferences as to what cleaner to use, but a fragmented registry will slow you way down. If you are not comfortable then by all means do not do this, even though it is pretty straightforward.

Bill Houghton Loc: New York area

You have me confused. Photo's, or files don't have programs or accelerators running, how would keeping them on an external drive help your machine to run faster.

LFingar Loc: Claverack, NY

Click on "Start" then click "Run". In the space provided type in: msconfig (all lower case). On the page that pops up click the Startup tab. This will bring up a list of all the programs that boot up with your computer. Most are not needed. Uncheck the ones you don't want, such as Microsoft Office and other such programs and then click apply. You will have to do a restart and a pop-up screen will come up telling you you modified the start-up. Click the "Don't Show Again" box and you are good to go. The programs you checked off will still run just fine when you need them, but they will not start up and run in the background, using resources, everytime you start the computer. You will be surprised how many there are. Caution: Do not get curious about the other tabs on the msconfig page. You can cause yourself a lot of headaches. You can't do much harm on the Startup page. Windows even gives you the option to Select All, but that's not a good idea generally. PM me if you have questions.

C.R. Loc: United States of Confusion

if it has norton on it get rid of norton. norton would slow a ferrari down to 55. giant resource hog.

LFingar Loc: Claverack, NY

That's an understatement! Zone Alarm and Webroot both have good virus programs that don't use near the resources that Norton does.

Capture48 Loc: Arizona

MAC

bobsworld Loc: Rocky Mount VA

My bad, hitting the caps at the beginning of sentence, yes all lower case on the msconfig, sorry missed that. Thanks for giving him the detailed directions, was leaving that to chance hoping for the best.

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

Storing files on the external drive as such doesn't speed up the processor, but could have impact only if your internal drive is so full there is not much "scratch space" for the editing program to manipulate data while it works. Unless you have under 20% of your drive as free space, this (moving the image files to an external disk) likely will do nothing to improve performance.

As a number of us have already stated, the speed of the processing has most to do with the amount of RAM in the computer - more RAM = faster working (since it means less demand of the much slower hard drive "scratch space" mentioned before).