I have an Acer Aspire One, with an Intel Atom processor and running Windows 7 starter. Although about 3 years old
Cheap laptop, cheap processor and 3 years of Windows usage bloat equals recipe for sluggish computing.
Your only hope if you don't want to spend money (and don't value your time at much) is to spend a few days doing a thorough deep clean (or, even better, a reformat and fresh start ... just saving your documents, reinstalling software from scratch, otherwise you'll only re-introduce bloat).
You could also try an SSD hard drive and more RAM... it won't exactly turbo charge things, but it might (possibly) make things a little snappier.
But to be honest, if you look at it as a long term investment (3-5 years) ... new laptop with decent spec is the way to go.