Oddly enough, I had the same problem when I first used my Vaio (out of the box). I couldn't figure out the problem either. I later attempted to put XP onto the machine, failed (the first time) and went back to the recovery disks (vista). The overall speed of my downloads was much better after going back to recovery. However... when I finally DID downgrade to XP, the performance was almost the same as my desktop.
I think the download speed is proportional to how slow these Vaio notebooks are, until you either (1) uninstall all the junk or (2) downgrade to XP.
