I am running my first Vista installation; it is on a new laptop I got a couple of weeks ago and one thing I can tell you for sure is best to have 3 gigs of ram or more. It is pretty much true what you hear that Vista can be a system hog. Of course I did not tweak it at all so if you are tech savvy in that way you might be able to get by on 2 gigs of ram or run it very quickly on 3 gigs. Personally I really enjoy Vista but I find it absolutely hilarious that a DOS window still loads up at the beginning it is actually quite nostalgic it a strange feeling the brings me back to the Windows 3.1 days.