Extreme CPU usage points to mostly one thing: There is a process or program (or even service) running that is using a lot of CPU resources or RAM. This can occur especially because of RAM, when there is low amount available so the computer has to write it to the Virtual RAM (swap space) on the hard disk. This is considerably slower than writing directly to RAM so it can slow down the speed of your machine. This can be fixed by upping the RAM to 2GB. This shouldn't be too expensive, especially with today's cheap RAM prices. You also have not much free space on your hard disk, and this might be a problem. Not necessarily the amount of free space, but the amount you've used. You probably have lots of files, and movement can cause fragmentation of the hard disk. This can be overcome by using a free disk defragmenter (like the one that comes with Windows - It's in the Admistrative Tools folder). This can increase the speed that software loads at, though probably not by that much.
Another factor can be the time you've had the laptop for. It can be found with Windows that 6 months to a year after installing Windows, it can begin to slow down. This is just because people install and remove software so many times that parts can still remain, and there will be so many unneeded services running that use up considerable CPU power.
Sadly the fix to that would be to reinstall Windows. It does delete all the stuff on your hard drive, so you'd need to back up. You said this wasn't an option, but I'd still strongly consider it, it's what works best.
Second to reinstalling Windows you can always just check the list of Services running on Windows (Services program in the Administrative Tools folder) and stop any that you can clearly identify as not being needed for you (also set to manual start so that it doesn't restart once you've restarted your computer). This is also helpful, but it's sometimes hard to find out what is needed and what isn't. You don't want to stop something Windows critical from running, or something like an anti-virus application.
I hope this has helped, but I still maintain that reinstalling Windows is the simplest and safest process. It's especially difficult for someone that doesn't know exactly what they're doing to mess with the Windows Services.
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