System Hanging Maddeningly - HELLPPP!!

Hellllppp! I am getting frustrated with frequent system hanging and not responding and that circle is making me dizzy.......Here's my plight - and from what I've been reading on the net I'm not alone with this.

I have an HP Pavillion dv7-6b32US with Windows 7 - 64 bit
Processor is Intel Core i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.20GHz
4GB RAM
600GB HD
Video is Intel(R) HD Graphics Family

I keep getting that stupid hanging circle thingy even wehen I just right click on things. Something is causing system lags and I don't know how to fix it.

I have done a disk cleaning and a registry cleaning and defragged my HD

If there's additional information you need please let me know.

Alisa