Those of us who have been testing Vista betas and release candidates will probably be telling you Vista is great. Some will even say Vista appears to be more responsive to Windows XP. But that's probably because we're the sort of people with high end computers that support the new features and give Vista room to work it's magic. We're the sort who were simply being held back by the 5 year old Windows XP OS.

In a backwards looking move, ArsTechnica have investigated running Vista on a couple of iconic builds that fall far short of the optimum hardware configuration. Systems that were built while Vista was still a gleam in the eye of Bill Gates. It's pretty interesting, but no great surprise. Bare in mind while reading the review that Ars was basically testing the systems with the same usage pattern they would have got under Windows XP, which would exclude anything taxing like content creation or gaming.

ArsTechnica reviews.