Before that, that XP install made the hard drive make lots of noise and pause for a while as the result of years of aborted profiles (going back to 2005!), so this is really based on whether you're treating your OS right.

Anyway, one of the many little things that makes older OSes hard to bear after Vista is the newly corrected GUI support for variable size fonts. Try making text bigger in any pre-Vista OS – it's a freakin' nightmare. On Vista, you can do it easily; and you can make it as big as old or young eyes require. As a result, you have your big 1600×1200 (or 1920×1200 for that laptop) screen size and you can keep your vision.

That alone makes it worthwhile – but then we have features like nearly performance impact-free thumbnails, even thumbnails on folders, and a great file replace dialog that will give you all the relevant information to decide whether to replace the old copy, or rename the new copy, or skip it altogether; and you can set it to do that same action on the whole folder when you're certain you've made the right choice. When it comes to the next folder it asks you again.

No doubt there's some non-freeware method of getting even Windows98 to act like that, but this is actually integrated with the OS.

If you ran Mac OS 9 on a new Macbook, I doubt anyone would be impressed that it runs really well.

I still don't like Vista, but they're not really offering some shocking revelation here.

I work quite a bit with vista at work and we run it decently well on older machines but the minimum ram we install is 1 gig for standard users and 2 gigs for people that use lots of diffrent or special software. The main problem on the older laptop is that the old 5400 ata mini laptop drives really choke on the indexing stuff.

I have had vista on my laptop since the RCs when it launched at first i found it kinda buggy and slow. Now since sp1 i dont think i have ever had a single problem with speed or crashing. People that complain vista is too slow on a new machine might have some problems with the machines themselves. Its true windows xp will always outperform vista in speed tests. However in most cases id say that the performance diffrence on new computers wouldnt be really noticable to standard users.

The fact that vista defragments the drive automaticaly and the more granular control we have over administrator priveledges (which prevents people from getting spyware at all) means that the vista machines in our it infrastructure maintain a very constant performance. Our XP machines would often after 6 months be full of spyware and the drives would be fragmented and they would run like mollases.

For the Home user vista is not really worth it. Most of vista's good features are aimed directly at enterprise use. Bitlocker, Image bassed installations, UAC. This is where vista shines but to most home users all those 3 things are completely useless.

I can personally say that vista has benefited our company greatly. I did a vista deployment to a 450 users across 3 sites with 1 image. 1 image to maintain,1 image to rule them all. 2 of our 3 sites are made up of mostly french users the other is english, 2/3 sites are made up of all ibm/lenovo the last one is using half HP and half lenovo.
The idea that i can cover this kind of enterprise with 1 image is incredibly timesaving.

We did a survey after the migration on 2 key factors, Speed and functionality the overal results were over 85% satisfaction which is a big win when dealing with a product that has so much negative press.

Well anyway. Im starting to feel like a dirty dirty microsoft whore now so il just stop here.