Vista and my new laptop inspired this thread. I just got done rebuilding my old laptop. It is a 1 Ghz Celeron with 256 (16 of which is used for the video card) MB RAM. It came with XP home 5 years or so ago, and while it was fine for a while, it kept getting slower and slower, to the point where we haven't used it much. I tried to wipe it out and reinstall everything, but it still seemed slow. So....

I pulled out the old Win98SE disk and rebuilt it with that. I never thought I would go back to any 9x product, but it is much quicker now. This laptop is used exclusively for web browsing, so I have added additional software. I am debating even leaving off virus scan, since there won't be anything on here that I'll care about getting infected, and scans will slow it down.

If nothing else, I've saved myself from having to buy a new laptop for a while. Wireless card is working fine. It took a while to find a good video driver, but I got that fixed this morning as well.

You've made a good point. Many don't need fancy hardware and software just to cruise the net and write e-mails .

For me it's just the boot up times that drive/drove me nuts for the older versions and slower CPU's. However when it's just the OS loading I seem to remember the boot ups being not too long.... hmmmm .... I may need to rethink scraping the old 1.6ghz tower and just remove all the junk the kids a have put on.

Please, for the sake of others, put on virus protection. We don't need more botnet members out there.