After right-clicking or hitting delete on a file, I have a 15-20s wait before anything happens. After doing it once, it is fast to do so to the next file (doing a few rar's or something), but as soon as I don't touch any files for about a minute or two, it goes back to the huge delay to perform anything.

Specs:
Dell Inspiron 6400
C2D T7200
2GB DDR2-533
120GB 5400rpm sata drive
Radeon X1300

I've tried defragging and unchecking 'Automatically search for network folders and printers'. Any similar experiences?

Thanks,
Jo

your hard drive is 5400 RPM's lol!

Right that 5400's take longer than 7200's but the lag here is rediculous (and it was not like this for the 1st few months I owned it).
Jo

Have you cleaned it out and defragged? If not, get CClean, which will get rid of your temp files and other stuff and then defrag. I usually do this in Safe Mode under Administrator.

I defragged and used ShellExView to disable some of my context menu options since another forum suggested that a bad context menu handler may be the problem. Thus far I have seen no improvements after either method. Even my old PC's never did this with a higher workload than this laptop.
Jo

If it were me, I'd back up everything and do a Clean Install. If you have to use the Dell restore disk rather than the Windows CD, I read in the last couple of days about some free software that let's you remove a lot of the crapware Dell and the rest put on there machine but, unfortunately, I don't remember where I read about them.

There is a program to tweak the original windows disc, but I'm not sure it will work with DELL install discs.

The program is called nLite.

You just copy the contents of the CD to a folder, and locate that folder with nLite, then it should let you tweak it step by step.