Vista is OK
Vista has its problems but I have it running on a 2.2 GHz desktop (home) and a 2.6 GHz laptop (home/work). They run great. Of course for my work desktop that I must count on I run XP for now but I think a lot of the Vista stuff is over blown and being said by people not rolling it out to hundreds of desktops and had a problem with their custom or old kit. Again Vista is not great, but not the total piece of crap claimed. As for XP running faster that is true and if I take the same PC and run 2000 that is even faster. So you need to weigh the benefits of the newer OS versus the hardware you are running it on. As for rolling out and controlling/securing desktops Vista is a step up and if all your users are running is Office, Adobe and simple stuff like the it's even good. People run out and load Vita without doing any evaluation of whether they should and when it doesn't run on their old PC or their 16-bit apps get errors they say it sucks. If you were in IT you would never do that on a production system and identified the performance on a test PC. Which is why a portion of PCs came downgraded to XP because they weren't a good fit for that dept.
I'll stop now, just tired of the Vista flametards who never used it or used it in a scenario that was never going to work and would have benefited from planning.
I get aggravated at plenty of MS software crap from admin'ing many of their products so you'll have to take my word I'm not a fanboy. Just someone who doesn't feel need to jump on the bandwagon...