Will upgrading a plain vanilla Vista system to Win 7 make it run faster like the old XP? It is mainly used for e-mail and some other basic functions, no games.

We got a PC for my wife to replace an older one running XP and she is not happy with the snail like speed of Vista even though I have taken out the frills and done what I could to get it to perform as well as the XP.

I should have paid the $120 to have XP installed by Dell and now rather than going for an XP "upgrade" I'll go for the Windows 7 if it helps. Thanks

It depends on what the specs are. How much memory and what processor does it have? I would say if it's really slow with Vista, 7 is not going to help much. XP will run pretty well on older Celerons with 512Mb of RAM. I think 7 needs 2Gb of memory to run well and at least 4Gb to run very well. I tested it and it's not faster than XP. I have a Core 2 Duo and 2Gb of memory and it runs OK though.

For 89 bucks, you can get a XP home OEM disk from the egg.

Thanks for the info speedbump. It looks like an OEM XP disk is the logical way to go.