I don't know what it was, but our school used vista for the comp lab and they were all using roughly 40% of the 1.5gb ram idle; after a login. Yeah it did run smoothly, and yes you will have to get used to some things changing around. Right now, I'm running win2k. Yes, 2k. I never felt like buying XP or Vista; so I have a very fast machine. (3ghz, 2gb ram, 512mb vid). I am going to get a laptop in roughly two years; and windows 7 will probably be out by then so I will never get vista. I've also read a lot of bad things about vista; unsupported hardware being the most common. Also, one of microsoft's top guys said that after getting vista, he then had a $2100 email machine... Also my brother got a laptop about a month ago, and it had Vista. Now, most things run ok, but he has to right click on most things and click 'run as administrator' to get them to work properly. Also, whenever he plays Guild Wars (nothing else) windows media center pops up and destroys his internet connection.