For files accessed you could try Start/Documents but that is a relatively short list. Next you could try Documents and Settings/your username/My Recent Documents and sort by date.
I suspect the only way you can check which programs were run is where programs make some update when used (eg ini, cfg files). One route would be to search for *.* on your C drive (which will list every file), sort by date and examine the ones in the period the laptop was accessed. You may recognize some program names.