I have had my new Inspiron 1525 for about a month now and am very disappointed in it's performance.  I'm sure it has nothing to do with the hardware itself (since this is what Dell online support told me repeatedly).  I'm sure it has to do with running Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7.  I am hoping someone on this forum may have some suggestions as to what I can do to "speed" things up.

When I purchased my notebook, I maxed the memory out with 4Gb and it has a large hard drive, 2 Ghz dual core processor, and standard onboard video.  I assumed this would make the system scream compared to my 1.6Ghz, 1Gb memory on my Dell Latitude.  It doesn't.  The Latitude actually appears to run faster.  The other difference is that I am still running XP and IE6 on my Latitude. 

As I indicated earlier, Dell online support checked my system and said everything was working properly (according to a Vista utility).  But, since I spoke with them, I have found that one of my issues with IE7 is with Protection Mode.  With protection mode on, my web browsing is painfully slow.  I found that I can disable Shockwave Flash player and it will run normally, but I don't get the nice animation on most websites.  Or, I can turn off the Protection Mode, but I'm not sure I want to do that.  Does anyone have any suggestions here?

The other specific area I see proformance issues is when I am playing music and open another application, like MS Excel.  It often makes the music "skip" until the application is fully open.  Once again, with 4Gb of memory, I would not have thought this would have been an issue.

Any suggestions on how to speed things up would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Mike