More Memory Please!
“If there is one thing that can really help applications on Windows Vista run better, it’s memory.” - Jim Allchin, Microsoft Vista Blog Team.
When running XP and Vista on identical machine, you would have thought that Vista would win hands down being newer and all that. You’d be wrong to think that. XP will generally outperform Vista on machines with less memory as Vista uses a bit more memory to do the things that make it so good, like indexing your data, keeping the fancier AERO UI running using the desktop window manager (DWM), etc. Vista Begins to shine when you say put a gig or more of memory in it, especially once you have been using the machine for some time, because Windows Vista learns what you do the most often and optimizes for this (nice).
