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I've turned everything off which differentiates Vista from XP visually. There are still tens of processes which I could get rid of - mostly from the laptop manufacturer but I'm too lazy.

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 I need a 4GB USB stick to make it faster?!  is that what you're telling me??

It's not fast enough to give more speed.

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 am sitting here typing away in a web browser and other than punching the keys there is nothing else I'm doing yet the hard drive is ticking away and I've turned off indexing, defrag..so what the hell is it doing?

That's what taskmgr is for - check what's happening.
I've turned everything extraneous off and just my antivirus software does those slowdowns every now and then, mostly when joining new drives to the system or downloading something.

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Progress...