Arjan, that is a crock they will not update the dirvers.
Hayes, my laptop is a core 2 duo 2.2 or a 2.0 GHz with two GB of RAM.
I can fire it up, wait about 20 seconds, then fire up my gaming PC I built over Christmas.
It has XP Pro, a 3.0 core 2 duo, and also two GB of RAM.
It boots up into Windows faster and finishes first, even though I fired up the Vista machine first.
I prefer XP over Vista for gaming, as it does it better form all of my research, but Vista is OK.
It works good on the laptop.
First thing I did after booting it up for the first time was to Google how to get rid of that stupid nag screen when you are installing stuff, and it asks you if you really want to do that or not.
That was really irritating.
I do not like arguing with a computer, and when I tell it to do something, it had better darn well do it now
There were also some good tips in a few back issues of CPU on how to speed up both XP and Vista by trimming down stuff that you really do not need.
Some of it you have to enter the BIOS at bootup, and tell it not to check your CD drive first, but to check the main disc for the OS.
That alone can shave a few seconds off at bootup.