bill - 1:36 am on May 8, 2009 (gmt 0)

IOW, if your machine is more than about 4 years old, consider looking at a new machine. In many cases the cost of the machine is comparable to the cost of a new OS when you factor in the speed of the new hardware.

That would probably only work if someone were paying full retail for one of the most expensive OS packages offered. There are many more affordable ways to get an OS licence.

One free example would be to try out the Windows 7 RC beta on your hardware. It has a licence that's valid until June 2010.

Is your current HD formatted as NTFS? I have found that drives that were formatted as, or are formatted as FAT32 are flakier than a bowl of granola cereal.

Interesting analogy. However I've always found the granola I buy to be remarkably un-flaky. It usually consists of clumps of herbs. ;)

There are arguably uses for FAT32 partitions. For example, many experts over the years have suggested placing your swap files onto a FAT32 partition for increased speed. The presence of a FAT32 partition wouldn't always be that strong of an indicator.

THAT should be a wakeup call to M$... Hey guys, we are willing to pay 100 bucks per machine to NOT run vista...

Not necessarily. There are a lot of corporations with legacy applications that need to run in a 32-bit XP environment. For them it's a necessity, not a preference. That might be one of the reasons that Windows 7 will have XP mode [webmasterworld.com] on certain versions.

As has been well documented, Vista has higher hardware requirements compared to XP. Here is the Windows Vista: System requirements [microsoft.com] and a handy Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor [microsoft.com] you can download and run to check whether your current hardware will handle Vista.