Did your friend buy a Vista machine with roughly equivalent hardware? I dropped $1200 on a Vista laptop (Inspiron 1520) back in 2006/2007. It wasn't slow (Kubu

Did your friend buy a Vista machine with roughly equivalent hardware? I dropped $1200 on a Vista laptop (Inspiron 1520) back in 2006/2007. It wasn't slow (Kubuntu on the same HW was faster though) and I don't recall it ever crashing. Sleep worked reliably although it was more on the order of 30 seconds with a spinning disk. I very much preferred it to XP at the time mainly for the the start menu improvements. I think a lot of the Vista issues - and to a larger extent, complaints about Windows - come down to subpar hardware. It's my suspicion that if you pay less than $1000 for a laptop it's probably not very good except on paper. I am still using that laptop today - to write this post in fact. About a year ago I replaced the harddrive with an SSD. I can't speak about Vista performance since I installed 8 (now 8.1 Update 1 or whatever nonsense MS calls the latest Windows), but sleep is extremely fast; the instant I open the lid everything is usable.