Want To Speed Up Your PC?

Vista is unfairly maligned, in my opinion. At the time it was released, it stretched the limits of existing hardware, but as higher memory densities & faster processors became available, it hit its stride.

Vista was the first non-server Microsoft O/S (other than 64 bit XP, which never really did anything market-wise) to support multiple CPU cores. It has greatly enhanced security over XP, and really was the harbinger of the best O/S's - Windows 7 and up.

Compatibility was somewhat of a problem, but only because of that enhanced security. XP programs that took advantage of direct hardware manipulation (which can be good or bad, depending on your point of view) had difficulties, but very quickly most mainstream programs came out with Vista versions. It's actually somewhat amusing that XP was knocked for its security issues, but yet Vista was then knocked for correcting them.

You can run Vista on a very minimal system, at least by today's standards. The machine I use for radio automation is Intel Atom-based (dual core), with 2GB memory. So it isn't exactly a powerhouse (although it was 10 years ago). It was the slow mechanical hard drive that was the performance issue, and now it runs almost as fast as my Windows 7-based laptops with i3 & i5 processors for common tasks. Of course, it gets blown away for anything CPU-intensive (the i5 blows away the i3, and the i3 blows away the Atom).

One big advantage of SSID's that I didn't mention was that they are great for laptops, as there are no moving parts. You can actually carry these things around with you and you don't have to worry about moving drive heads and hard disk crashes.

Yes, but much slower in terms of transfer speeds. SSID's use SATA circuitry to directly interface to your computer.