that was the reason I reformatted my laptop with a clean Vista install. The difference is amazing.
I believe, with many laptops, the recovery partition, or disk created from the recovery partition, will restore all the original software that was on the computer when it was new. So, in all such cases, the reinstall is not going to yield a nice clean system without all the extraneous software that was on the computer when it was new. So then, it's really up to the user to get rid of, i.e. uninstall, unneeded software. Still, the time and effort spent doing this can yield noticeably improved performance.