XPS M1330 Sluggish Performance

[quattro04]

Hello guys, my aunt's laptop is acting very sluggish. Vista loads in 3mins and running windows update slows the laptop to a halt. Opening some items in control panel also gives the same result.

I narrowed it down to 2 possible culprits, memory (only 1GB DDR2 667 SODIMM) and corrupted OS. I'm leaning towards the latter since I ran my desktop with vista with also 1GB of memory but didn't encounter this kind of problem. Also, I haven't encountered any BSOD's so far.

Now for the questions:

1. What do you think is the culprit?
2. If I restore the laptop to factory defaults using the recovery partition, will I need to enter the product key?
3. If I added 2GB of memory with same speed, will restoring to defaults recognize the added 2GB of memory?

Thanks for your answers!

System Specs:

Intel Core2Duo T5250 @ 1.50 GHz
1GB DDR2 667
Intel GMA
Windows Vista x86 w/ SP1

 

[Zoron]

As long as you use Dell's recovery media (partition or DVD), it will not prompt you for the Windows product key. Upgrading to at least 2GB of RAM isn't a bad idea, though... I'm surprised an XPS laptop didn't come with 2GB standard.