Yeah, those Gateways were bought at Best Buy, brand new with Vista. Came with little 17" LCD monitors and pretty nice MSI mobos that even had a PCI-e slot should you decide to upgrade the graphics. Drivers were terrible and hard to find too as I remember one lady had a digital camera and I could not find a driver that would work with the little USB adapter dock for her cam.

I tried to get them to take them back and get their money back, but they were determined to keep them because they were bought on sale. One of them smoked not long after I worked on it. Two small 80m fans to cool that deathstar heat maker Prescott CPU was not going to last a long time.

Yes the bloatware was incredible. You may not believe this, but to boot up to a semi-workable state would take about six minutes.

I use Teracopy too. It's a great utility. And PC Decrapifier helped with the bloatware.

First thing I do when I get an off the shelf pc is a format and reinstall. I don't even bother trying to uninstall the crap they stick on there.

You should try PC Decrapifier. I just bought a HP laptop a couple of weeks ago and they are still just as bad as they ever were about garbage. That program uninstalled all the crummy games, the trial of MS Word 2010 and a boatload of other useless crap.

The only area Win 7 is significantly faster for me is shut downs. Start ups are also a bit quicker, but with Vista it was essentially the same (~ 90 seconds on my PC) from hitting the power button.

XP Pro gave me more headaches in a year than Vista/7 did combined over 3-4 years.

Vista 64 Business with SP2 and all security patchs is a great OS. Win 7 pro is faster on boot ..no question and has a few nicer features but as it stands now at this mature state I would not hesitate to install - use it on any 64 bit build.