Cool, glad that problem was fixed!
The clean install is a must, IMO, so it's good that was done. So many companies load a TON of proprietary crap onto boxed PCs and laptops. It usually just replicates existing Windows services and rebrands them - which eats up resources and CPU time.
One thing about Vista is that when it first boots up, memory usage will be slightly higher. After it has run a while (10-15 mins maybe), Vista caches a lot of services and optimizes itself. With all active apps closed, my PC usually runs at about 22-26% background RAM usage. This is with 3GB DDR.
Not sure how much memory you have in your laptop, but I would max it out. This is one area that really helps with Vista. It's a complex system, it needs a decent platform to run on. 2GB should be minimum. I use 3 as that is the practical max for a 32-bit system. With 64-bit you could use even more - provided your system's hardware can map more than 4GB of memory resources. Since memory is so cheap right now, I'd max it right out.
If you know all this already, please disregard.
