I just received my new Dell Precision 690 work station and am very disappointed in the performance. I will use this computer almost exclusively for photo-editing. In comparison to my Dell D820 laptop programs do open faster however using a stop watch most Photoshop functions operate in the same time frame. I find it hard to believe this computer would not hands down out perform my latptop???

Work Station Specs:
Dell Precision 690
Dual Core Intel Xeon Processor 5130 2.00GHz, 4MB L2,1333
4 GB DDR2 ECC SDRAM 677MHz
160 GB SATA II Hard Drive (7200RPM) (operating system)
160 GB SATA II Hard Drive (7200RPM) (just for Photoshop Scratch disk)

Laptop Specs
Dell D820 Latitude
Intel T2300 @166GHz
2 GB of RAM
100 GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)

Is there anything I should be looking at that could cause the work station to run so slow? If not I will return it

Photo editing/rendering like video and music is CPU intensive and 2.00GHz isn't particularly fast unless server CPUs are different from regular computer CPUs, which could account for your problem. Actually, editing/rendering seems to really benefit from quad core and while Intel is faster than the AMD Phenom the Phenom isn't that much slower

What OS? Vista Vs XP is a tad unfair.
Have you tried defragmenting your HDDs? That may help a bit.