Question : Why is Compaq 2510p laptop very slow?

I just bought a HP Compaq 2510p laptop.
Here's the hardware spec:
RAM=1GB
CPU=Intel® Core" 2 Duo ULV Processor U7500 (1.06 GHz, 533 MHz FSB, 2 MB L2 cache)
OS=Windows Vista Business
It takes long time to login to desktop, to launch any application.
Task Manager shows physical memory usage is consistently over 75% even though you are not doing anything, CPU usage is below 15% when idle, but it can rise quickly to 60-80% for quite sometime when you launch a program. It just kills the excitement of having a new laptop.
Q#1. What is your general experience with Vista compared to XP Pro?
Q#2. Is my CPU appropriate for Vista?
Q#3. Will 2GB RAM boost the performance 'significantly'?
Q#4. Any other ways to improve the performance/fine tune the laptop?
Thanks a lot.

Answer : Why is Compaq 2510p laptop very slow?

It seems to me that your a under powered.  A 1Ghz processor, even if it's a Core 2 is going to be sluggish.

Q1, vista is slower than xp, it needs a little boost in the hardware, other than that, it's a great OS with many improvements over XP
Q2, your CPU is significantly under powered.  1Ghz simply isn't going to cut it IMO
Q3, 2GB of ram will help, but you're going to be held back by your CPU try other performance enhancements before you go the memory route (caveat, if you have a 1GB stick of DDR2 533, a second stick will get you double memory bandwidth which should help alot)
Q4, MS has released several performance improvement updates via the download center that didn't go into windows updates.  Those updates will then be incorporated into SP1.  If you can wait until mid march for SP1 to show up on download center.  See if you can.

Tweaking performance is a complicated process.  Things i suggest is disabling secure desktop (if you haven't disabled UAC all together)  (i recommend you keep UAC), for my computer it used so much shader processing power it caused my 6800GTO to overheat and was giving me screen corruption.  I can't imagine that intel's onboard graphics would handle it any better.  You'll save alot of graphics and CPU performance by disabling that in gpedit.msc -> computer configuration -> security settings -> local policies -> security options -> user account control: switch to secure desktop (disabled)

Other things you can do would be to disable the sidebar, it likes to eat up lots of virtual memory.

Updated drivers for your hardware can help performance significantly, if you can keep your computer's performance number (system rating) above 3.0, you'll be okay, if it dips below 3, vista will be unbearable to use and you should consider switching back to XP.  The only settings you can really help are the graphics numbers, HDD, CPU, and RAM will generally stay the same.

I suggest you look at these sites for tweaks to enhance performance.  Vista is still young , so the amount of them are minimal, you can start here.
http://www.tweakxp.com
http://www.tweakvista.com
http://www.howtogeek.com/tag/windows-vista/