is a Win Xp Prof. 2003 faster than my laptop's?

[test84]

Hi,
my laptop is a toshiba m115-S3094 and came with a Win Xp MEdia CEnter edition on it, ITS REALLY SLOW.
my desktop is an AMD 1333mhz Athlon Thunderbird (dont get greedy!) with a normal Win Xp 2003 Professional and is like 10 times faster.
this laptop has a Core Due at 1.6ghz but when i want to open a excel sheet file, it takes like 7 seconds!
desktop's ram is 256 and this one has 512.
so the question is:

How to get this laptop faster, i dont want the option of buying ram since I'm not sure that i can add more ram to laptop (i can open its back and can see the ram slot but donno if its expandable or not) and its so pricey. Is changing its windows to a normal xp profesional will solve the problems?
(i used a program called Driver Magician to backup the drivers that are currently installed on laptop so i *guess* i'll have no problem restoring the essential drivers such as my modem and touchpad).

p.s. is there any software to check that how fast should this computer be and like that? (sandra soft just checks the health, i want to check performance and not like 3d mark which checks 3d performance).

thnx ppl.

 

[cubin']

try downloading this:
http://www.overclock.net/benchmarking-soft...dra-2007-a.html

It's got a few benchmarks in it but I'm sure people will post of much fancier ones.

The laptop shouldn't be lagging that hard, it should be very quick but may slow down when you get a few programs going.
Try scanning for a virus and using a spy ware scanner too.
Look down at the taskbar near the clock and see if many programs are sitting there eating up memory.

there's lots more stuff you can do to find out the problem, so if this stuff doesn't make a difference wait until someone more skilled posts, shouldn't be long

 

[Darkforce]

Laptop hard drives are typically slightly slower than standard desktop drives because they spin at 5400rpm whereas a typical desktop 3.5" hard drive spins at 7200rpm. Shouldn't affect it too greatly though.

If the XP Media center was preinstalled on your laptop you may find the manufacturers have bundled/installed a load of crap onto the PC when they shipped it to you which can slow it down a lot. Ctrl + Alt + Del without having any programs open, click processes and see how many processes are running; on a clean install you should have around 25 processes, maybe 30 if you have anti-virus/firewall programs, printer/wireless utilities running. You can disable any unwanted processes at startup by going star>run>msconfig>startup.