I wouldn't mess with your startup items unless you're sure of what you're doing, especially on a laptop as they often have poprietary software running features that you may well be using.
if I had your laptop in front of me i'd bring up the task manager (Ctrl-shift-Esc) and take a look at the performance tab, this shows you quite a bit of information about your memory including a graphic showing your page file usage (as a proportion of the total amount).
points of interest, physical memory total, if its less then 256M then an RAM upgrade might be in order if thats an option and if the availiable figure is consistantly less then about 5-10% of the total then more RAM would certainly be a good idea.
Commit charge, if the total is concistantly more than 75% of your total physical memory then thats another indicator that your system is RAM starved, here we can also see your limit (PF plus RAM) and your peak values, if the peak is anywhere near the limit then you want to increase your PF size, microsoft recommends a page file size of 1.5 times the installed physical memory.
If you need to alter your pagefile size, enter your system properties (right click on your my computer icon and select properties) and bring up the advanced tab, click the performance settings button then select the performance tab, where it says virtual memory click change. Set a custom size of 1.5x your RAM size or more if you have very little RAM, set both the initial and maximum size to the same value e.g. 1024.
if you are starved for RAM and updraging isn't an option then reducing the number of programs running in the background including services is a viable tactic.
