Project slooooow to load w/ Nuendo 2.1.1 - M-Box

[guitarrob]

I recently purchased a Sony Vaio PCG505 1.4 Centrino machine. I mainly run Nuendo with my M-Box, using the Digidesign ASIO driver. This set-up works great with my Allenstein Athlon 64 XP3200+ rig, but doesn't work so well with the Vaio laptop. It takes in excess of 5 minutes to load a project from a USB2 external 7200 RPM Hitachi harddrive that I use for audio. Also, every operation seems extremely sluggish. If I switch to the generic Multimedia ASIO driver within Nuendo, the project loads in a matter of seconds. I have the Vaio optimized somewhat for music, keeping the start-up lean, display options at a minimum, hibernation off etc. I also tried defragging both the internal system drive and the audio drive, but it made no difference. Any suggestions? Thank you in advance for your help.