Vista does suck overall. It has great advantages but not to the naked eye much Much more integrated and in reality it's a little ahead of it's time. When you first get a notebook with it you need to leave it on for a day or so. It will run all through the night indexing everything on your harddrive. It also defragments continually. Downside is that the size of the install went from 6gb(xp) to over 30gb(vista). The amount of processes running is over 50 from the start. Vista is generic and tries to please everyone. Go to the run menu and type services.msc and look at everything that pops up. you'll find many things you never use like messenger(not msn), remote access, etc. Disable these processes and your computer will jump. Also the biggest downfall is most computers being purchased now are 64bit processors yet the factory installed operating systems are 32bit. The processors are backwards compatible so it's cheaper for the companies this way, however, it does murder the speed. Upgrade the vista to 64bit, send me a pm if you're wanting to know how, and you'll see the real horsepower come alive. Problem is that joe public, ie my mother, doesn't know this so when they pay for the machine they just assume it sucks. I guess in reality it does since you're the one having to tweak it. There has been widespread hate about Vista's performance and Microsoft currently has a patch out that's in beta mode currently being tested by a few thousand+ users. It should be released any day now. It will be relatively large download and might take 10-20min to install but it's reported that it fixes the speed issues. Also when you first purchase a machine make sure to uninstall all the software from the proper menu. They put this "crapware" on your pc, full of trials etc., as advertisements for those products. Its the reason they are able to lower the cost of the units so much. Once removed you'll also notice a significant speed boost.