New Vista machines will appear to be sluggish at first. This is due to
the intensive Indexing that goes on. Until the Index is fully built Vista
will run slower and use around 200+ Megabytes of RAM that won't
be utilized after Indexing completes. Also it takes a few days of use
for the machine to fully utilize Superfetch.

"Gary R." <roberthouse@geocities.com> wrote in message
news:%23gguUDQaIHA.3940@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Thanks for all the excellent and quick responses!
>
> This gives me something to work with...if all goes well I can try the
> install and see if the drive is recognized without additional drivers, or
> can do the slipstream or external floppy if needed. I have a retail copy
> of XP from a dead machine (with SP2 already slipstreamed), so cost isn't
> an issue, should it not work out.
>
> Re the cautions: I know there's a possibility of things not working due to
> drivers (this is a Gateway, and I haven't found ALL the xp drivers yet,
> but am still looking for older machines with that same hardware and XP
> drivers). This is why I want to be sure to have a good disk image made
> just before I format. If I don't find the drivers, or it has too many
> issues, I can live with Vista, though I may wear out my finger from
> clicking "yes, I really do want to move that shortcut into that folder" or
> "yes, I really do want to run that program" so many times 8^).
>
> Performance-wise, it seems like this machine "feels" about the same as my
> older 2003-model Gateway laptop with 1 GB and XP, and a Celeron, where
> this one has a dual core Intel and 2 GB, so the extra power is just
> probably running stuff I don't need, instead of giving me nice zippy
> performance.
>
> Gary
>