My Imac is so much faster than my macbook pro???

I recently bought a new MacBook Pro,I was tempted by the MacBook Pro and brought a 15.4-inch display, 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo, with 2GB of RAM,I was so disappointed on its performance.Then i got an imac with both Parallels and a clean installed WinXP. the clean install is much faster than my macbook

Did you pick an option that upgraded the hard drive to 7200 RPMs?

The standard drives in all the laptops are 5400 RPM, slower than the iMac. Some of the Macbook Pros allow you to upgrade to faster drives. I'd think you'd remember doing that, it usually involves paying more money for the same amount of drive space.

So if you didn't do that, your laptop drive is simply slower. That's probably all it is.

Well I feel this is easy to explain.

The MacBook Pro has older, slower technology and the iMac has newer and faster technology.

The MBP you have has a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo (Merom) with a 667MHz FSB. And that MBP uses the Napa Platform which includes the Intel 945 Mobile Chipset (which controlls how every component in your computer communicates with the CPU, Intel Controller Hub 7 (ICH7) which controlls devices such as Hard Drive Transfer, USB/Prereffrial Transfer Speed, and finally has a Radeon Mobility x1600 (which is extremly underpowered and old). This Platform debued in Jan 2006.

The iMac you have has a 2.00GHz Core 2 Duo (Merom) with a 800MHz FSB. The iMac uses the Santa Rosa Platform which uses the Intel 965 Mobile Chipset , Intel Controller Hub 8 (ICH8), and a Radeon Mobility 2400XT video card (Well its not fast, but significantly more powerful than the x1600 Mobility). This platform debued in May 2007.

Finally, your MacBook Pro uses a 2.5 Inch Mobile Hard drive, only rotating at 5400rpm. Quite slow, however good for power savings, acustics, and size. Your iMac you have uses a full 3.5 inch desktop hard drive at 7200rpm. Also, your Hard Drive in the iMac has more density. 250GB vice 120GB. More density usualy equals more performance in newer hard drives because the data is closer together.

All the Things highlighted in Red are improvements. This is just a brief explination but this is why your iMac is Faster than your MBP.

I actually have the exact same two machines you, except for different RAM configurations.

iMac 2.0 Ghz - 4GB RAM
MBP 2.16 Ghz - 2GB RAM

I find the speed about to be the same on both machines. Not sure if your partition is slowing things down. I don't believe it should. Maybe you've got a lot more files on the MBP? Who knows.

There should be enough difference that you can notice it with a stopwatch, but not enough difference to notice in everyday life. I had problems like that with a MacBook that had an unreliable hard drive. I swapped it for a new one, and things were fine. So I would really recommend doing a Time Machine backup, just in case.

Apart from that, keep Activity Monitor running and check if there is anything unusual going on.

It'd certainly be worth using disk utility to repair permissions and verify the disk on the MBP. I'd also suggest opening Terminal and doing a
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
just in case there's a lot of old/temporary stuff that needs cleaning up.

When I was having issues with my MBP (which turned out to be nothing to do with the MBP, just a bad LDAP config) I obliterated my startup items, did the above and did a little other cleaning out. The thing boots in 20 seconds flat now, it's so damn snappy. Mine's a more recent MBP than yours, though, yours is the older architecture so it will be inherently slower than your iMac anyway.

You could also try Onyx, and trouble shoot with that.

Try Deleting all your caches, run maintence scripts, redo prebindings, verify/repair permissions, and verify/repair disk.

If you are still having issues I would Do a Clean Install of Leopard.

If you are still noticing severe issues, after all the steps above have been taken, then report back.

It could also be you use the iMac more, and the MBP hasn't had enough uptime to optimize the hot files.