Read this article
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3179571720.html
Now there are many things that are wrong here. First of all I ran Vista beta 2 on an old hp computer with a 800MHz PIII celeron processor, 256MB of RAM. Vista ran very dicent on it and I didn't have any problems with it. Second, businesses don't need the Aero theme, so they don't need to worry about it. A computer with the specs described in the article should run almost perfectly fine. Then there's the thing with SLED. It costs about $40 a year for each computer, the business owner will not be saving much money. Then there's crossover office, why in the heck do you need to pay $40 extra?
Also, Vista can actually use flash drives as memory, that guy that wrote this was just...

Another thing, vista will run fine with 128MB of VRAM. But if you want all the eye candy crap in SLED you will need a video card with at least that much memory, and it has to be nvidia or ati, preferably nvidia, as installing the drivers for ati is heck.
And why spend more money on useless software like that transfer crap software? Ever heard of "backing up"?

In conclusion this article is inacurate in most aspects. The writer is an ignorant person who needs to research the facts and actually test stuff.

bah. of course it's bias and inaccurate. it's from a LINUX website. I mean, don't you think they would be a 'liiiitle' bias twoard SLED?

WTF thenss - i went out and baught the full (retail) version of vista. I have a pentium 4HT 3ghz with 1gb ram and vista when IDLE uses 60% CPU and 700mb RAM! and i personally think SLED is crap too - why is the freaking updater still broken?????

what are you using to test it? I personally think the built-in performance monitor they have doesn't work properly with HT.

i know its gotta be right as when i open ie it takes over a minute

there's something messed up then. I run into no problems whatsoever, running IRC client, voice recognition, two browser windows, and a small host of sidebar gadgets, no problems to report.

Is this happening consistently? Is something clogging up your processor power? Are you running a virus scan?

its a clean install of vista on a blank HDD - vista reports no driver issues - no 3rd party software is installed

I'm running vista business on a laptop with a p4ht cpu, 512MB ram and when windows is idle, it uses 1-2% of cpu and 60% memory. The default gadgets for cpu meter don't work well, i had to get different ones from the web.

what's the name of the gadget you use?

I can't remember, but if you go get new ones and search for memory you'll find it. I think it's called memory meter or something.