[eryque]

I'm at the tail end of setting up a new computer. I couldn't pass up the deal, $300 for a Compaq with a P4-3.4Ghz and 1GB of ram. It came with Vista and I thought I'd give a shot.

I wanted to give Vista a shot, even though I'm usually a curmudgeon about upgrading an OS. Well, that shot didn't last long. Just the OS consumed an average of 50% of the processor and 60% of the RAM, and any multimedia bogged it right down.

Installing XP has been a long and arduous process, thanks to a couple of hardware issues, but man is this box fast now! iTunes is busily converting my music library, and when the CPU usage spikes it's all the way up at 30%, and less than 25% of the RAM is being used.