Are my Latitude expectations unrealistic?

Ive had my 6400 for over a month now and im not sure if my expectations of this new laptop are unrealistic.

Granted, Ive had a few problems with it (fan issues amongst others) but what is most surprising is the overall speed, or lack thereof. Considering that I have the 9400 Intel Duo, 4gbs of RAM and a NVIDIA chip, I was expecting blazing speeds.
However, simple tasks seem to slow this thing down.
For example, opening my Control Panel takes roughly 5 seconds.
Itunes takes at least that long to load up.
Word occasionally freezes up and does "not respond" and ive noticed a slowdown in my internet connection as well ( iwas just scrolling through a multiple page word document with graphs in it and the scrolling was very jittery).

I have very few items running at start-up and right now I only have two apps running.

Am I doing something wrong here or is it Vista thats bogging me down? I feel like my 1gb ram, 8 year old toshiba on XP is as fast, maybe a hair slower.

 

That's strange. I'm running a Dell Studio with specs in my sig, and control panel takes 1 second or less to open up - with many applications running.

 

considering you have 4 gb of Ram, it shouldnt take that long. Maybe you have lots of programs running in ur background? Ctrl+alt Del to check and close the ones that are taking up too much processor or ram speed (except explorer). Hopefully that helps a little.

 

Have you made good use of this thread yet? If not, do.

 

Pix-I appreciate this-alot of great info here.
However, how do I know if this stuff is really on point and that I wont cause any damage to my computer?

BTW-is how much of an effcet does Windows Aero have on my speed? Should I use another theme and if so, how do I change that setting?

 

Aero shouldn't affect your speed. I'm using arrow right now with windows blinds, no decrease in performance...

 

I use Aero still, and I only have 2GB of RAM. But I've done a lot of those tweaks. Defragging files and boot files is important, cutting boot time is good, eliminating unnecessary services, etc. Lots of people have done those tweaks, and if you follow the steps it's pretty safe. Anyways, it's your call.

 

Your problems are definitely software problems, nothing to do with your E6400
As said above, I advice you to tweak your system, and maybe make a new install of your windows.

 

First thing I do with new computer is reinstall the OS.

 

I understand what you say but I don't agree that it has nothing to do with the E6400. I think it is sad if the default installation on a laptop is of so bad quality that you have to reinstall the laptop to get it to work properly. E6400 will be bought by many small businesses that don't have resources to develop their own customized installation image. They have to use the installlation image provided by Dell and it should have good performance out of the box.