Performance issues due to video card (i assume)

Hello,

I have a 2 year-old Latitude D830. Ever since I got the laptop it was slow to respond. Over the years I tried many things - formatting, installing new drivers, upgraded to windows 7 (beta, rc1, rtm), add another 2gb ram (make it a 4gb machine) I tried everything !! Any other dell computer I compare it too, whether it's a new model or even an old model - it's slower without a doubt.

I had an expert friend check my machine and he compared it to his dell XPS machine which is 4 years old, running the same Win7 rtm (he even has a slower cpu than mine - core 2 duo 7200 while mine is 7500), and the most noticable issue was the video card - I have a quadro nvs 140 which presents poor performance (windows experience puts it at 3.4, while his video card is at 5.0).

We tried running a sample app that compares directX performance in Hardware and in Software, and the software was better than the hardware (HW was 10% slower, sometimes even 70% slower) !!

I tried installing latest nvidia drivers through Dell's site, used windows update, even downloaded newer drivers from Nvidia itself, nothing helps - video performance is very poor.

Is this a known problem with this video card? is there anything I can do to improve my machine's performance?