Toshiba 3500 Slow/Pauses Help!

[root]

I have a Protege 3500 with 512MB including:
1)XP Tablet+all MS WindowsUpdate stuff
2)all Toshiba latest drivers+BIOS
3)Office 2003beta+TR(01/31/04 expire)
4)TabletPlanner +sp1
5)Dragon 7 preferred+latest SP
6)NAV 2002 + latest updates/defs
7)Adware181+latest defs
8)frequently defragged HD
9)etc etc

After the original install it seemed to be just ok performance wise.

Now there are unexplained pauses during which there is little or no HD
activity ie it's not a disk bound pause. For instance on a Logoff or
Restart there is about a 60 second pause where nothing at all seems to be
happening including no HD activity and then a flury followed by the
Logoff/Restart. Bringing TabletPlanner or Word up seems slow taking maybe 3
seconds. If one has several opens apps including the above open and showing
in the Taskbar and then one goes along the bottom and clicks them then it'll
take each one 3-5 seconds to come to the front and fully painted. There's
more but the above gives the picture.

Other XP desktops even old PIII/600+slow HD ones Restart and Logoff fast
with no pauses and stuff starts faster.

What's happening? Where should I start looking? There is clearly something
wrong.

I found a thread from last Jan where some guy got a new 3500 and clean
installed everything and said that made everything vastly faster than the
3500 was out of the box. How does one do a clean install with the XP CD
Toshiba delivers as I believe it's just an image to restore?

 

[root]

I've made a significant discovery.

Adjusting the setting in the little green SystemTray icon for Intel
SpeedStep to "performance" from "automatic" did NOT fix/change anything; it
still takes over a minute to logoff. In ControlPannel there is a selection
"Toshiba HWSetup" inside there is a CPU tab. I selected "Always High"
rather than the previous "Dynamically Switchable" which requires a restart
for the selection to take effect. When one restarts one finds that the
little green Intel SpeedStep icon no longer appears in the SystemTray. AND
one finds that the problem is FIXED.

Logsoff in 10-12 seconds and clicking successive buttons in the TaskBar
causes virtually instantaneous appearance of the respective windows.

Next to confirm I reselected "Dynamic Switchable" in "Toshiba HWSetup" and
restarted. The green SpeedStep icon is back BUT it's still fast! In the
SpeedStep icon I then selected
"Automatic" and it's still fast! Restarted and it's still fast.

So aparently knocking SpeedStep out and then bringing it back fixed the
problem until next time I guess.

Does this behavior ring any bells with anyone?? A more satisfying fix?