Office 2003 Professional Problem

I just got a brand new laptop. It's a Toshiba Satellite A105-S4021. It's running Windows XP Professional with service pack 2 and all of the Windows updates. It has a 1.66 GHz Intel Centrino processor and 512MB of RAM. I installed Office 2003 Professional on it, then it went downhill. It is taking between 2 and 3 minutes to boot up, and the hard drive is lagging. If I play an MP3 then open a browser window (or any other program for that matter), the MP3 skips and sputters along. It takes longer than it should for a new laptop to run an application. Can anyone give me some clue as to how I can fix this problem? If you need any more info, let me know. Thank you.

 

Well, it almost sounds to me like the Hard Drive, so I would recommend starting with a scandisk and a defrag. A link telling you how to run these can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/gettingstarted/speed.mspx

Also, it might be worth checking for spyware or junk, I would try the main Majorgeeks Malware removal thread and see if anything comes up:

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407

 

I went through MSCONFIG and removed all of the startup apps except for SynTPEnh (my touchpad), thotkey (Toshiba hotkeys), vptray (my antivirus program), ctfmon, and RAMASST. The paging file size is 756MB.