@ article author
Hang on, you yourself said that you were impressed with the speed of Vista when you first bought your laptop, and that it wasn't until after four months of use that it started performing like rubbish.
Then you go on to say that after what, a day? a week? of a fresh XP installation, you're blown away by the speed?
Funny, I seem to recall my old 98, 2k and XP installs running like bollocks four months after installation, right until I re-installed the OS.
And another thing - I'm sick of these "Vista sucks!111onetyoeonnetwo" comments. Yes, it sucks if you run it on inadequate hardware. That's been the case for every Windows OS. More to the point though, SHUT UP about it! Nobody cares that XP runs better than Vista on a 3ghz wankfest, or that Ubuntu runs even faster. Or any other freetard version of *nix, for that matter. We already know. So shut up.
I run Vista on a 2ghz Athlon, with 1.2gb RAM and a 120gb SATA HDD. It runs fine. I do gobs of RAW image manipulation in Photoshop, and it's fine.