Up until this point I've only ever tried out Windows Vista on my laptop and have found the performance to be lacking. I'm pleased to inform you that Windows Vista runs sooo much more smoothly on a desktop machine. I mean we're talking leaps and bounds here. Granted my laptop is getting a bit long in the tooth but we're still talking 1.5GHz Penitum-M with a 7200 RPM hard drive, and a gig of memory. Not too shabby even for a two year old laptop.

My desktop machine is equipped with a Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading, and my guess is that the hyperthreading is making all the difference in the world, seeing as the only difference between my laptop and my dekstop machine is the CPU. My desktop is even older than the laptop in any case :) Vista seems to be much more comfortable in a hyperthreaded or even better a dual core environment.

If you were to ask me about one thing to make sure to get for your Vista machine it would definitely be a dual core CPU of some kind.