Vista Very, Very, Very Slow to Restore/Reinstall on Laptop

[Guest]

I've got a Toshiba Equium P200-1IR laptop in front of me just now. It hung up repeatedly on startup, and did the same in safe mode and startup repair mode. There's some HDD activity during the hangup, but it doesn't make any progress. OS is Vista 32-bit. I've repeatedly tried to reinstall from the manufactuer's disk. Partition restore goes OK, then it reboots to start Vista for the first time and becomes very, very slow, taking 1.5 hours to get even part way into startup.

I've reflashed the BIOS to no effect. Memory test reports no problems. Intriguingly, I can install and run Windows 7 Beta no problem. I can also successfully book Kubuntu 8.10 and Knoppix 3.9 from CD.

Anyone have any thoughts on this most bizarre and intriguing of problems? The usual searches of Google, manufacturers' website, Microsoft support, etc. have drawn a blank.

 

[Zoron]

If Windows 7 works ok, then the only possibility remaining is that your Vista image is bad.

 

[Strike_Team]

I'm the original poster, I'm having login issues, hence the different username.

The PC worked just fine with the factory install of Vista for several years. It then became very very slow a few weeks ago, and continued to be very slow after reinstalling Vista. This suggests that the Vista install disc is not at fault, as the problems was there before reinstallation.

 

[Zoron]

But, if as you say, Windows 7 works fine, then that kind of eliminates hardware as the cause... wouldn't you agree?