New Toshiba A505 - Seems slower than old A105?

I'm hoping some of you can give me some guidance to speed up my new laptop.

My old (but upgraded) Toshiba A105 (1.6 dual core, 4gb ram, 320gb hd 7200rpm, win xp sp3) still seems snappier, faster, and more responsive than my new computer.

The new computer is a Toshiba A505-S6035 - i7 quad core 1.6ghz, 4gb ram ddr3 1066, nvidia 330m 1gb ram, 500gb hd 5400rpm running win7 home premium.

I have Win 7 adjusted for "best performance" with all the fancy aero features and animations turned off.

Is there anything else I can do to make the computer faster?

Do you think Win 7 is to blame? My little Acer netbook did score higher on the benchmark software after I downgraded it from Win 7 to XP SP3.

Could the 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive be the bottleneck causing my slight dissatisfaction with the laptop?

The A105 did seem a lot faster after the upgrade from a 80gb 5400rpm drive to the 320gb 7400 rpm drive.

I'd eventually like to buy a nice 128-160 GB SSD drive for the system HD and then move the original 500gb to a drive caddy into the DVD/CD slot. I'd imagine that would give me the "wow, this is fast" feeling that I expected with this new laptop.

Thanks for any input you may have.

 

Paul You make a good point about the 7200 HD. I just worked on a friends A105, and it was very slow for everyday tasks. I removed or disabled at least 10 utilities that toshiba added in the original XP setup. Now this machine is very usable, and much snappier even with 1 GIG ram. My point is does your A505 have a clean win 7 install? (if not maybe removal or disabling non essential programs (via MSCONFIG) will help. Good luck with you machine, J