My old eMachines T6420 Athlon 3200+ machine running Vista died last month. So, I bought a Dell Inspiron 530 desktop running Vista to replace it. The old machine had a single core AMD chip and 2GB RAM. The new one has a quad-core Intel chip and 4GB RAM. Guess what? It feels like the new quad-core runs slower than the old single-core. Some apps like Corel PaintShop Pro XI are barely useable and often crashes (both PCs run the 32-bit version of Vista, btw). I had planned to switch from my still functional main PC running XP to this Dell running Vista. But, XP on the old PC runs so much faster, I’m having second (and third) thoughts. One thing that really help speed up the Dell and reduce disk thrashing was to turn off all of the Aero and Aero Glass features in Vista Home Premium Edition. You can see the few options I left turned on in the screencap above.