TortoiseGit really slow on Windows 7 machine

I think it's due to msysgit being slow when UAC is enabled on windows 7:

http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/issues/detail?id=320

Are you saying that the repository he has cloned is on a Samba share, or that he's actually directly using a working directory on a Samba share? If it's the latter, I'd strongly recommend cloning the repository locally (that's how git is supposed to be used). If not, I don't know why local operations such as status or commit are so slow. You might want to try out GitExtensions with MSysGit; I'm using it on Windows 7 (on a local hard drive) and am very happy with it.