Vista slow, Visual Studio 2008 verrry slooow

Hi,

I've been working for days to speed up Vista performance, have been through all the usual performance tweak tutorials (appearance/performance, start-up apps, etc) and am frustrated... In general Vista is not too bad performance-wise, but is very slow to open Internet Explorer and to find the first web page (OK after that), and is verrry sloooow to bring up or close Visual Studio 2008. Intellisense and typing in a project is nearly unusably slow. I have to type a few characters, wait several seconds for intellisense to finally pop up, type a little more, wait again (and again and again.) This box is my new dev box and I'm going to drop it over a cliff rather than work with it the way it is (not! But the temptation is there...)

In googling around, I don't see a lot of other folks having similar issues so I'm assuming that there is a setup or config or software or services or 'some' type of issue that is specific to my machine that can very likely correct the issue and get me back on track. I don't know where to start however, and am seeking some advice on where to start. As stated, I've already disabled all the startups (start up menu, msconfig) that I can ...I think, and have already played with the appearance settings, and have even tried raising the priority on visual studio to 'Real Time' via the task manager... And yes, things are better than they were, but the slow response time for Intellisense and typing in VS08 is killing me...

Thanks, All advice gladly accepted!!
Brian

Lenovo ThinkPad W700
2 ea 160 Gb Hitachi SATA drives, NTFS (work drive encrypted, system drive not)
4 Gb RAM
Vista Business SP2, 32-bit

Check with Process Explorer ( Process Explorer ) whether some process is eating your CPU. Click on where it says CPU above - that brings all the CPU users to the top. If you identify a process, hover over the process for more detail or right click on it and go to Properties for even more details. Maybe you can catch the culprit. Some processes you can also kill in PE (rigth click) - but not all.

TTT...

Still looking into this issue... Still open to suggestions.

Did you find any processes that monopolize your CPU?

Yes, sorta. services.exe and svchost.exe both run around 24-25 percent all the time, plus Kaspersky anti-virus runs at around 20%. Double click on svchost to find out which services it is running and it shows DCOM Server Process Launcher and Plug and Play ...Which is what I'm looking into. I read in one forum that the audio enhancements (all) need to be disabled to make this go away. Also heard that some HP drivers cause this problem as well ...I did install an HP PhotoJet 7100 driver awhile back, and then later on the printer (a shared printer on a home network, but on a different machine, and XP Pro machine) quit working unexpectedly and when I tried deleting and reinstalling the printer, I was only offered the 7200 driver. The failure mode of the printer was "Path not Found" ...although the shared drives on that machine were all visible and the printer WAS properly set up to be shared, correct name used, etc etc.

The services.exe lists several threads in its property pages but only the "services.exe" line itself shows a CPU percentage ...and something called RPCRT4.dll!NdrTypeFlags+0x400 is the only thread under it showing activity in the "Cycles Delta" column (whatever that is.)

I'll be working more on this tonight...

Brian