The first thing I did on my Laptop was get rid of all the XP eye candy and configure it for best performance over visual effects.
I will concur with this. Some laptops are very slow when compared to desktop machines. The first thing I did when I got my Dell Inspiron 4150 (thankfully I didn't purchase it ... got it from my company) was disable every piece of eye candy I could find "shut off switches" for. One that caused a HUGE performance problem was the "Show shadows under menus" option. With that turned on, simply clicking to open and moving the mouse around in the Start menu drove the CPU to 90+% utilization. Extrememly slow performance! Disabling that and everything else for eye candy makes it bearable. I still think it's slower than molasses in January for what it's running on, but I can't really do anything else to it without violating my company's computer use policies.
