How much free space on the HDD is there? If it's rammed full then it will take longer to do stuff as the RAM will be working overtime (no virtual ram space left on HDD allocation) and laptopdrives are generally quite slow (5400rpm as opposed to 7200 desktop drives)

Guy at work brought me his lappy to look at, complaining it was slow - turns out there was only 645mb of free space on his 40gb HDD I said no wonder and sent him to PC world to get an external drive to shift data onto