Doing a complete wipe and re-install is treating a symptom, not the core problem. The core problem is you have crappy, useless stuff running on your system and the second that you start re-installing things they will start showing up again immediately.
A far better answer is to start dealing with the things that are clogging up your system. The first port of call is Task Manager. Hit Ctrl Alt Del, and then click task manager, this will show you everything that is running on your system. Go to processes (the second tab) and then click on the memory header to arrange by memory use. This will tell you, in order, what things are eating your memory at this exact second. This will give you a good indication of what's happening under the hood. You'll likely see that the biggest memory users are things that you told the computer to do - Prime candidate is having too many browser tabs open, especially if they involve flash or other video playback. Close down as many tabs (and other applications that appear near the top) as you reasonably can. I'm not saying close it all, but my experience has always been that 'slow performance' is caused by people opening too much stuff they aren't actively working on.
Another thing to look at is your anti-virus software. Open it up and make sure it's not scanning. Because it eats a lot of resources to scan stuff, and if you have a low powered pc it can take a long time. If it is scanning, tell it to stop.
Next up, you can free up some (no where near as much as actual applications, but still some) by taking a trip to the system configuration window. To get there, open the start menu and type 'msconfig' (without the quotes) into the search, then hit enter. From there, head to the start up tab. There's going to be a biiiiiig list of stuff in there, and a lot of it you don't want to turn off. Don't turn off anything made by Microsoft, or that otherwise relates to hardware (graphics cards and SSDs being really important things not to turn off) but other things like Steam and Adobe's horrible updaters can safely be turned off. Clicking things off in here doesn't hurt them or anything, it just means that they won't automatically open when you start your machine, just when you open the program yourself. So this can clean out useless things.
Next, go to control panel and then 'Programs And Features', and uninstall anything that you don't need. Old applications add up a lot over time, and you should trash anything that isn't currently in frequent use. This will help to clean up your registry and as such help the machine run better. Also, it will free up hard drive space, which is more important than you think - All systems use HDD space as 'virtual memory' and if your drives are close to full then cleaning out unused files helps. That goes for user data too. Make sure you don't have a million cat gifs stashed away somewhere, and run disk-clean up to get rid of unused temp files too.
Finally, you can scan for malware. More paranoid people would say this is your first port of call, but I've only ever once seen a PC that had genuine Malware on (as opposed to just tracking cookies and such) but it's not something to be rules out. Go and find Spybot Search and Destroy and run it on your system. Let it fix/delete everything it tells you to.
Once this is all done, leave the machine on over night and run a defrag (assuming you are on a hard-drive, you aren't supposed to defrag solid state drives) which will again give you a little improvement.
With all of this done your system will be as good as it is going to get, exactly as if you had re-formatted and then installed all of your applications again. For older systems especially applications out-strip your machine, and there's a good chance that your machine is just showing it's age. That's just the way of the world sometimes.
Your biggest gains in performance are going to come from changing your behavior. I know it sounds stupid, but seriously - Close tabs you don't need. They all use memory. Close applications you don't need. Turn off widgets you don't need. All of these things will help. Putting less strain on your system will give you better performance in the things you genuinely are using right this second.
As for upgrades - You can almost certainly cheaply improve your systems performance by adding more RAM, or by installing an SSD to run Windows off of. These things sound complicated, but really they aren't. Adding more RAM is just putting a thing in a slot. Windows has a wizard for moving to a new hard drive.
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