T61 Memory Hog and Slow

I just got a T61, model 7658-03U. After playing around with it a short while, I realized that it was a remarkably slow laptop for the specs it has. Without using a SINGLE program, it is running at around 800MB used, and this is running XP Professional. About 200MB of that is just the ThinkVantage software. Is this typical of other users' laptops? This is the most bloated load I have ever seen on a PC. I was running Vista on a PC for a bit, and it used less memory than this sucker does. I was actually up to 900MB at one point with only Firefox running. Can one do a clean XP install from the recovery CDs without all the items that came standard on the laptop? I hate to contemplate doing a recovery from the CDs as Lenovo says that it can take up to 5 hours to do. That is the longest recovery I have EVER heard of. I can reinstall all my apps in much less time if I had all the CDs, plus only getting what I want. Overall, not really happy at the moment.

Thanks for anyone's ideas on how to shrink this sucker without spending 5 or more hours doing it.

 

Recovery doesn't take 5 hours, more like half an hour to an hour. You should do a recovery and choose the option to do a custom factory install. It will provide you with a list of the preinstalled 3rd party programs along with boxes next to them so that you can check and uncheck to install or not. Very useful.

Also, Firefox has a huge memory problem right now, thats why you're seeing such high memory usage. If you want to see for yourself, surf the internet using Firefox for an hour or so, then open up Task Manager and sort the process by memory usage descending. I'm positive Firefox will be at the top taking up hundreds of MB's of memory.

 

Well, wish me luck. I have no choice now, pretty much. I did some Windows updates. Right after rebooting, it said ntoskrnl.exe was missing. I started to try to restore it from a backup I made, but that ended up being more trouble than it was worth, especially with everything else. Now I am trying to do a custom install with nothing but the OS. Of course, it is not allowing that, either! Well, finally, after two prior attempts, it is working. Wish me luck. I wonder what my memory will look like now.