Vostro 1520 Vista Slow, or Broken?

Hey,

My brother has just received his new Dell Vostro 1520,
(Core 2 Duo T7250, 2GB Ram, 160GB, 8600 GT 256MB)

Upon first start it took about 20-30minutes on a "calculating performance" screen which seemed a bit excessive but since it was first start I thought nothing of it. About half an hour later it's setup, name, date, etc. "Loading Vista", I go to get it online... and it crashes. (Not a blue/red screen, just completely freezes)

After rebooting, this time it did the green loading progress bar when it starts, and when it had finished just waited on a blank black screen for another 10-15mins before going into windows. Once finally in I started taking off some of the junk (mcafee + roxio) and it seemed to run a little bit quicker, until I had to reboot which again took it 10-15 mins. In general it's just VERY slow, that stupid spinning loading circle is on the screen 3/4 of the time. I checked the processor wasn't being throttled and various hdd applications say the HD isn't damaged/bad in any way. So basically it's down to one of three things.

1. It is actually physically damaged and needs to be returned
2. Vista is actually that slow, in which case I need to put XP on it. Although when I used it on my desktop for a short time it ran much better than on that laptop, granted the desktop is a much higher spec, and it was the x64 version.
3. DELL have somehow managed to botch the Vista Install and something is causing it to slow to a stop. If this is the case, can I "just" use the Vista restore disk supplied to wipe it back to a clean state? (and it not re-install junk like mcafee) - do I need to keep the "RECOVERY" partition that takes up 10GB does recovery work fine just with the disks? (My laptop had a recovery partition, but the restore disks worked fine without it)

Any opinions would be appreciated. Thanks. If something isn't physically wrong with it the performance pretty unacceptable, be it DELL or Vista's fault.


EDIT: As a little update, if I boot it (taking 5-10 mins) and use it straight away it's really slow (not just while the applications start up in the background) for ages, however if I boot it, leave it idle for 30-45mins and use it it's perfect... weird?