Can time with no usage slow a system down?

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I dug out my Windows 10 laptop today due to needing a Windows machine to do some stuff with. I switched it on and it took forever to fire up, I checked the space on the disk and I had used like 25% so 75% was free. I havent done much on the system so Im wondering can none use slow a system down? currently cleaning up files and scanning the disks etc in the cmd and probs run a virus scan on it and hopefully bring it back to life.

Also if theres anything you ca recommend me to do to bring it back to life as much as possible please do let me know, so far I've done/ am going to do the following:

• Uninstalled programs
• CCleaner
• SFC /SCANNOW
• Virus scan
• Defragment of the drives using cmd

am I missing anything?

 

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No leaving a system for a long time should not slow it down whatsoever.

There are various system services that can slow down the system, typically windows search indexer and windows update.

If something like BIT's is running a lot it may be slowing things down.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb968799(v=vs.85).aspx

You can speed up system boot with msconfig and similar.
You can also turn off certain system services.
Disable unused drivers.

Just depends how far you want to go.

 

thanks @dmarsh I completely forgot about msconfig, I've managed to clean everything up, cleared like 80GBs from my HDD, I have like 36GB used out of 469GB

 

Sometimes just doing a fresh OS install is all that's required, usually however that's down to software installations\removals that haven't worked properly.

In other times it's down to the fact that you're running the OS on a spinning disk rather than an SSD and you simply forget how bloody slow a 5400rpm disk is when compared to as FAF flash disk ;)