Sony Vaio ---> laptop recovery procedure & XP drivers?

I have a family member who is currently going to school in the Caribbean (Grenada) & has a Sony Vaio laptop with Windows Vista. Its about 1yr old, but I'm not sure of the exact model though.

She has said she has had all sorts of problems with Vista and the laptop is always acting slow on her, doesn't respond or simply needs to be rebooted (which takes long too). Who knows if its a virus, spyware or just plain Vista in general. I am planning to visit her down there in about 2 weeks and was gonna maybe try to help her with it.

I think it has some sort of system recovery partition on the hard drive so one of my options while I'm there is I could possibly do a simple system restore to get the laptop back to the orignal point when she bought it. I'm not 100% positive this can be done and will have to check further, but I think I remember when she was visiting us with it, seeing how it had about 6GB hidden in a partition on the C: Drive through the Control Panel's Administrative section. If it does allow a system recovery option, how is it performed on a SONY laptop? I know with DELL's, its F10 during bootup to enter the recovery console, but not sure about SONYs. Is it real hard or easy like the DELLs too?

The other option I thought about is installing XP on her laptop instead of recovering Vista. This would not only be a clean installation, but would probably eliminate a LOT of trialware that it had installed. I would bring an XP disc down there, but I am nervous about making sure I have all the correct drivers for it. I won't be there long and will be busy with other activities so don't want to waste too much time trying to figure her PC out. Where can I maybe go to get drivers for this laptop (will have to find out exact model)? I've always delt with DELL laptops so not real familiar with how Sony does things or their harware procedures.

Since she has limited internet access down there right now (coffee shop, school or friends), I want to make sure I don't mess it up and can't get a hold of drivers after installation. Therefore, I would then plan to burn the drivers to a CD here in the US and bring it down there.

I guess if worst came to worst after an XP installation, I could just do the pre-installed Vista recovery though, right? Any suggestions.