Sony laptop - how to speed it up?

Hi everyone,

a friend of mine has a laptop with vista on it, and the specifications are good, i mean that laptop has to perform fast, it has i think around 1gb ram, nvidia, 80gb hard drive, etc…

but it performs slow and it does not have anything except of vista on it,

is there any other way to speed it up (or in other words bring the laptop to its normal speed) ?