i thought Vista would run poorly on my 3 year old comp since my $300 graphics card committed suicide some time ago and i'm forced to use the terribad onboard graphics. but recently i installed it on a spare harddrive and it runs smoothly, Aero and everything
in fact it runs better than XP O_O i'm sure the 2gb RAM i have helps. i'm guessing the cases of sluggishness that people have been reporting are mostly due to insufficient RAM or older driver issues
I bought a new PC specifically because I attributed Vista's poor performance to my old PC's poor specs; but the new PC is almost exactly the same performance.... though it's way out there as far as specs are concerned.
Vista x64 SP1 running on a WD Raptor 150, 8GB of RAM, a E6750 running at 3.2GHz - and still terrible performance. XP on this machine flies like crazy, and Ubuntu is great. Only Vista can manage to take so long to copy files to and from my USB drive, spend half an hour to empty the recycle bin, or move a file over the network - it's I/O performance is a serious hole-in-the-tub kind of affair.
(Note: I'm a Windows guy. Ubuntu is my preferred OS/distro; but I'm on Windows 90% of my time thanks to my job (which I love) as a systems engineer for Windows platforms.)
I had some really egregious file IO performance when I first got a new computer with Vista on it, but that seems to have mysteriously cleared up. Winzip was especially bad taking minutes to open archives that took xp seconds to do on a much slower computer.
that link also mentions that file operations on Vista may seem to take longer because the file transfer dialog stays up during the whole operation, whereas in XP it can be closed before the operation has actually completed
in fact it runs better than XP O_O i'm sure the 2gb RAM i have helps. i'm guessing the cases of sluggishness that people have been reporting are mostly due to insufficient RAM or older driver issues