Vista Slowness Fixed

I have a reasonably new laptop.  It's a Dell 630 with a Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz, 2GB of RAM, and a 60GB hard drive running Vista Ultimate.  For the past several weeks, it's been unbearably slow.  Opening Internet Explorer or Firefox took upwards of 15 seconds, for example.  Overall, the machine felt sluggish.

I tried a variety of fixes, but in the end the problem was Symantec Antivirus realtime protection.  I disabled Symantec from loading at startup, and the system is now snappy and responsive.  Just thought someone out there could use this info.

Technorati Tags: Vista, Vista performance, Symantec, Antivirus, D630