My laptop runs really slow, but is fine after a restart...?

As far as i am concerned, the less you have starting up as your laptop boots, the better. Lose all your widgets at start up and put a shortcut to them if you want to use them. Try to check your task manager performance and resource monitor for processes that consume lots of resources and begin isolating the resource hungry ones. Having to hard reset your laptop will eventually damage it. Please can you provide more information regarding the specs of your laptop. That would be a great help.