OK, we have all heard about Vista Bloatware, well us that have bought a new comp with it pre-installed have at least.
I have lived with it on my new laptop for over six months now.
I have to be honest, at first it looked great. But once you got past the flash it didn't take long to realise just how slow an opperating system it is.
I mean it's really slow, at first you don't notice it too much but it's true from the off. Add a few programs and things really start to show up in a bad light.
Finally I got fed up with it, waiting for a high speck dual core machine was not what I paid good money for.
This is a dual core proccessor at 1800mhz with 2gb of memory, so should be lighteningly fast with simple things like browsing. Not so. My old 2nd laptop is really old with a 700mhz proccesor and just 128mb of ram and side by side it has always loaded pages faster running on XP.
So, dump Vista and load XP onto the new laptop then, sounds like a good idea

Except my manufacturer never wrote any harware drivers for this machine to run on XP.....unbeliveable.......

So, I have spent some time scouring the net for XP hardware drivers to no avail....ummm...more

Then I discovered something called Vlite, a utility to strip out all the garbage from a Vista install. (they have one for XP too, called Nlite)
You can select exactly what you do and don't want to have installed.
I cheated and downloaded a pre-built copy with the bare minumim of instalation. Loaded it and it worked, 3.8GB of Vista instead of the huge 8GB original. Less than half the size.
I've been playing with it this evening and all you need still seems to be there..
Only...it's sooooo fast, really much faster, web browsing is instant, as you would expect....so far I really like it, makes my old machine now look slow.
This is how it should be !!!
Though I still wish I could load XP.....

I might give it a go and see what doesn't work...it might not be much at all ??