i am one of those guys who likes to test a lot of stuff at the same time, And the speed on my laptop is a definite indicator of the amount of stuff that i am working on playing with at a given time, Yeah most of these applications start running on start up and eat away a large portion of the memory and then i need to do go to the task manager and turn off each task after identifying the problem file after great difficulty...here is a program that makes it a lot easier...it is called Starter, (i picked this usefull information from the blog "Marcs Outlook on Productivity"