help with vista reinstallation for inspirion 1420

My friend got the inspirion 1420 recently and complained that the laptop was running pretty slowly so my first guess was that she probably had one gig of ram or less, so she couldn't run vista as well and she probably still had a ton of the default dell bloatware on it.

after going through her laptop a bit, her laptop has 2 gig of ram and didn't have much bloatware on it, but it was still kinda sluggish, so i decided to reformat the hard drive and reinstall vista on it to see if it would help.

as for the installation of vista, i didnt touch the recovery/media direct parition, and just reinstalled vista on the original vista parition. after that, i slipped in the drivers CD and installed most of the drivers with a check mark next to it. the only ones i didnt install were two weird hard drive drivers that were made by intel. all the drivers installed fine as every other driver required a restart and it successfully restarted every time.

after that i tried to get on the internet at the school, but it required us to get antivirus and get all the window updates. i installed mcafee, downloaded all the window updates, installed them, and when it had to restart after installing the window updates, the laptop encounters a blue screen when booting into windows (it occurs at the screen with the bar scrolling). the bluescreen pops up and disappears way too fast for me to see what it is, but when i restart the laptop, the same thing happens.

i tried running the startup recovery utility option that were given to me, but it didnt find any problems. they gave me the option to do a system restore so i did, and it restored me back to the point before i installed mcafee or all those windows update.

have anyone encounter this before? it seems fairly weird to me. i don't think mcafee caused the crash because she had mcafee before the reformat, and i dont think the drivers were it because it rebooted fine so i guess it had to be one of the window updates?

also the laptop still seem pretty sluggish even with all the drivers installed. the laptop seems to be perpetually loading from the hard drive (the light is always on or blinking) even when i'm literally doing nothing.

does anyone have any idea whats wrong? this is starting to drive me nuts because i dont think i did anything wrong in terms of installing the wrong thing, or reformatting wrong.

 

a fresh install of Vista will result in it indexing the hard drive for about the first week of use. It's 'normal'

And you're using a sluggish program like McCafee.

Get rid of MaCafee, run a disk defrag, make sure all drivers are up to date (not just he ones from Dell's website), run a registry cleaner like Eusing Registry Cleaner, tidy things up with CCleaner and then see if it's still slow...

 

well i installed vista on my old and now broken laptop and it really didn't have that much slowdown when compared to her laptop, and mine only had 1 gb of ram.

i agree that there are more slowdowns for mcafee, personally i use the free avg one, but i figured that mcafee is more secure and she doesn't does anything intensive with her laptop so it probably wouldn't affect her as much.

but i doubt that its mcafee, it was constantly loading even before mcafee was installed. even now, after the system restore, mcafee is not even install and the hdd light still turns on/blinks like a madman. does anyone know what those 2 intel "hdd drivers" are? i never had it on my older inspirion model.

 

well i reinstalled all the updates and it boots up fine now, but it still read from the hard drive constantly so its not mcafee.

i turned off the indexing option under window services and it still loads like a mofo. internet explorer takes a good 5+ seconds to start up when opened for the first time (for the reboot). is this considered "normal"?