New Laptop Speed

[Devo]

 I just started to travel for work and decided to buy a laptop. Got one called a Medion MD2900 Titanium. It's got everything, 2.4 Gig, 512 meg ddram, dvd r-rw,
O.K. you get the picture. My question is I have a 850 athlon desktop at home and it seems to be faster than my laptop. Is this normal or is this something I should be concerned with while it still has a warranty. It seems to work fine but it just dosen't seem to have the speed it should compared to my desktop.    

[query]

Notebooks are invariably slower than their desktop counterparts - drives are generally slower, and other components tend to be optimized for battery life rather than performance.

That said, the notebook should be faster than the desktop - unless something else is wrong.  How much is loaded by default, and are there any real performance hogs (like system restore, FindFast/Indexing Service), etc., that you could turn off?

[Devo]

 It came with Windows XP Home so I am sure most or all of those programs are running by default. How would I go about turning these off?  

[query]

Start-run-msconfig or start-run-services.msc will give you the panel to turn them off.

[Devo]

 Thanks I'll give it a shot.