Extremely Slow Performance of Vaio VGN-TZ170C

Hi there:
My boss just bought a new Sony laptop, with the intention of getting one of the thinnest, lightest laptops you can possibly get. In any case, she wanted me to try connecting the thing to our network and configuring it and the like, and when I start booting Windows Vista, I'm just totally floored by how absolutely slow and sluggish everything is.

It's like trying to run vista on an old Pentium 133 or something. The whole boot process takes over ten minutes to complete entirely, and doing anything, like pulling down a menu in an office application, usually requires a wait of about ten seconds.

It's really difficult to work on a system like this. Can anyone think of why a brand new laptop, with no additional software (other than the stock Sony stuff) would be so awful?

Its specs aren't even that bad:
Intel Core 2 U7500 @ 1.06 GHz
1GB RAM
32-bit Vista Business

Windows Experience Index:
Processor 4.3
Memory: 4.1
Graphics: 2.0
Gaming Graphics: 2.6
Primary Hard Disk: 3.9

So maybe the video card isn't that special (Intel Extreme Integrated Graphics)... is it possible that Aero is causing things to be this retarded? I've never noticed substantial performance differences with it before...

I'd appreciate any ideas in regards to this.

Just some more info:
To show that I'm not embellishing, here are times that I recorded with a stopwatch for bootup:

Power On: 0 sec
Login Prompt: ~1m30s
Can See Desktop: 6m33s!
Sidebar with only the Clock gadget is fully loaded: 8:55
Windows finishes loading most startup programs and begins to respond "normally": 11:30.

For a few minutes after that, even, things are still slow, but they never really get overly fast, like I'm used to with a modern desktop. This is brutal! My boss had installed Norton Internet security, so that causes the booting to take a little longer, perhaps, but I can't believe how slow a laptop with these specs is. There has to be something wrong. If I didn't think it'd be a pain in the ass, I'd just install a clean copy of Vista Business and make it work.

Indeed... after dealing with this issue (which actually partly cost me my job, thanks Vista!) I have learned that there is a BIG difference between how well Vista performs with 1 GB of RAM and 2 GB of ram, so that would have helped. But the worst of it was that the graphics memory was shared, so that even further limited the available ram. This laptop should NOT be shipped with Vista in its stock configuration... it's awfully slow. I think that pairing the lack of available memory with the slow micro hard drive in the machine, you get something awful for performance from the page file.