Cheers for the heads up!

Bottom line is if you disable all the "great and wonderful" features, then it becomes a tolerable operating system.

great and wonderful" features - dose it look like xp then. Still not toyed with vista yet

i have been using vista since day 1 with no problems, longs u got 2 gig of ram and a decent cpu it will run fine. I have vista and xp on my laptop (dual boot) both as good as each other.
I remember when XP first came out very buggy and sluggish, 4 years on and xp runs like warp speed why(hardware).
I do think some people upgrade to vista but don't upgrade their hardware, then they still blame the OS.
Gaming on the other hand on vista thats another issue, thankfully my gaming is done on the 360 now so i am not keeping up on the lastest graphics cards like i used to.

I like Vista. Question aboot ready boost though, will it make much of a difference if you've already got 4gb Ram and your OS is installed on a striped array?

Readyboost is not supposed to help if you have above 2GB RAM, it also only works with fast memory cards, prob at least half the cards on the market are unsuitable making it a bit of a lottery. I was holding out hope for Intels Robson technology, but again this apparently is not what it seemed either.

First thing I'd do is turn off the Vista Search Indexer, it sux big time...

Physical RAM and RAID drives are indeed still the way forward it seems, unfortunately this means for laptops a beast like this :-

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4096

Suddenly a Macbook and OS X looks like a sensible choice !

best way to speed vista up is to uninstall it

nice thread thanks

One way to speed it up is to push it out of a helicopter. Speeds it up nicely before the terminal impact thats coming.

I also have to agree with the others, why don't people also upgrade their hardware too?

I think part of it is because people don't know better, and they buy new computers with vista already installed on it and it really should not be. Why companies would sell something with vista on it and not the hardware to support it is beyond me. There is a big lawsuit going on here that has to do with vista and that little sticker that they are putting on computers that say vista ready. When with only 1 gig of ram and a low end video card it obvious is not. I had joe sister return both her laptop and desktop back to walmart over this crap and got her to order from dell instead.

LOL. The best way to speed up Vista is to throw it harder when tossing it into the trash.

I seem to remember Acer selling entry level laptops over here with 512MB of RAM, and this is the best bit.... with shared graphics memory! Quite a few folks complained because the thing was so slow. It only worked because Acer ghost images onto new machines, you cant install Vista with less than 512MB, with 64MB being 'borrowed' by the graphics adaptor it was quite a poor show!

Maybe my mum needs to invest in more RAM, hers is like people say here, Package PC shipped with Vista when its not suitable, she has 1GB RAM but it reads at 758MB or something similar (aparently its because of the different way the RAM is read by the OS, RAM is the next chapter in my book lol).
She doesnt seem to get that annoyed that its so slow, winds me up so much if i use it, brings the worst out of me

That's likely because the the video chip in her computer uses shared memory (not dedicated memory, like on an add-in video card)... so it's permanently consuming 256 MB of her RAM.

Not if you're a Photoshop user who likes to open 1800x4000 pixel 16-bit stitched panos. That's when you watch Vista go down like a five dollar ho. With Aero disabled, 4 GB RAM and 12 GB of CF cards attached via USB for ReadyBoost, it runs nearly as fast as Photoshop on the same machine in the XP partition with only 4 GB of RAM and no ReadyBoost.

Too bad I can't run Photoshop on Linux -- I'm betting it would eat W2K/WinXP/Vista alive. Period.

Fuel costs have driven the price up to seven-fitty.

I was just having a conversation with a developer at work about this yesterday. I was complaining that using GIMP to create graphics for my content was something of a chore (I work on an Ubuntu desktop).

Best way to improve Vista's performance is to install SP1! The difference is like night and day. One caveat though, you can't uninstall it, so to be safe do a full PC backup first.