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Core solo does go down to 1.5ghz. That could probably wipe the floor with an early 3Ghz P4. Then there are the fairly recent laptops, Pentium M/celeron etc.
So it's so simple as that.

Have you ever tried it? Because it doesn't In fact, I have an 800mhz PIII sitting here with only 512mb of ram...Windows XP SP2 with current updates...running IE7, windows firewall, windows defender, & Symatec Anti-Virus Corporate. It doesn't chug. In fact, it runs quite nicely It runs just as well as my 2.4ghz machine does when surfing the internet, listening to music, using office, etc. Would it play games decently? No, but there are a LOT of users out there that don't play games...or use photoshop...or do ANYTHING that taxes a system at all.

Actually, at my workcenter we run 2.8ghz P4 systems with 1gb of memory... and Windows XP. We're constantly getting calls on how slow the systems are running, despite the fact that we'll check the processes and see XP sitting with nothing else open eating up some 360mb of the memory. Once we start talking running programs (which include CAD, graphics, authoring tools and other business apps) there's a lot of activity going on in the machine. And running Windows XP on our company laptops (which are Dell, meaning already underpowered to start) and I don't joke when I say to the user to log in, go get coffee and 5 minutes later the machine might be finished with all the login scripts and programs that have to be run.

I used to work at a technical college where we had systems with lower specs than that running XP (some of them were the 800mhz machines I referenced in my first post), and we never had issues running CAD programs, SQL server, cartography programs, or any of the other specialized software we had to deal with. I would definitely go over your image and figure out what's chewing up that much memory, because that's NOT normal. I only have 512mb of ram on this rig (XP SP2)...running quite a few visual enhancement programs such as kapusles (which is using a massive 46mb) and objectdock...and I'm still only using 300mb. You may want to check your virtual memory settings as well

A log in shouldn't take 5 mins either...even on a laptop working of a wireless B connection. If you're talking low end P3 laptops then maybe, but not a p4 or pM laptop. I setup a "mobile" lab of 30 laptops loaded down with criminal justice apps (which are a pain to get working right I might ad), and I never had that kind of login lag any of the 1000 or so times I had to log on to each and every one after they'd get back.

I'm just trying to say that what you're seeing isn't normal. You might want to look into what's going on (image, login scripts, DCs, etc.) and see what's causing the login issues as well, because that ain't right.

Actually, in a hefty windows environment (30 workstations or laptops is nothing...) with roaming profiles and domain authentication for everyone, logins in a Windows domain can very easily take 5-10 minutes, depending on what kinds of scripts and such you're forcing the clients to run @ logon.

People like the blame the problem on the workstations though - and in a case like this, the problem isn't with the workstation at all - it's somewhere else along the network, usually at your DC or server holding the profiles. SMB is notoriously slow with XP clients, and doesn't handle scaling well at all - those servers get bogged down with requests easily.

So it's possible - but yeah, blaming XP is completely incorrect. In this case, XP isn't the problem at all.
That being said - I ran XP with all the visual crap turned off on an old P2 laptop and it ran beautifully. It's all in the setup and configuration. I've run Vista on systems well below Microsoft's posted minimum specs with the same results. *shrugs*

A co-worker of mine asked me if I could optimize his computer. He's an older gentleman in his mid 60's and only uses his Slot I Pentium II w/MMX for email and web browsing.

I was able to load XP Home w/SP2 on his 10-gig hard drive. To make sure his CPU could run good I added a 64-Mb PCI graphics card and updated to 256Mb of PC2100 RAM.

With AVG and Ad-Aware running and a DVD-ROM drive installed this P2 was able to run rather smoothly and was very much able to run DVD Movies as well.

Yes I was amazed that this Slot I Pentium II w/MMX could run XP Home with no glitches. There still is life for those old PC's sitting on the shelves at Goodwill :o)

I take it you have never used Vista. Where the hell do all these people get this crap. Who told you that you need 2gb of ram and a quad core cpu to run vista. If you belive that stuff you are truly retarded.

I think they make it up. I am typing this up fram a 3ghz machine with 1 gig of ram, and installed on a 20 gig partition and it runs actually faster then xp does on the same machine on a bigger partition.

Agreed. Having dealt with the many versions of Windows over time, it's always best to take Microsoft's recommendations and literally double them in order to have a workable machine. So a gig of memory, a 1.6ghz processor and a decent graphics card is probably the minimum I'd recommend to anyone wanting Vista. And if you want the full blown experience, make it 2gb and at least 2ghz on the processor... if not more. If Vista is like XP, the more memory and power you give it, the more responsive it'll be.

Just don't go past 2gb of memory, at least for the x86 version. I ran into a nasty bug loading Vista where it won't recognize USB drives unless you either drop your memory to 2gb or lower, or drop your USB to 1.1. It crops up on nVidia motherboards, btw... not Intel systems.

I don't think the RAM is so much an issue. My notebook's a Core Duo T2500, and I'm running Vista Ultimate (even use media center,) with only 1G of ram. Even on this system Vista's snappier and responds more quickly than XP ever did, and that's with all of the bells and whistles turned on.

I monitored my pagefile usage for a week and a half, and it barely even gets hit - even under a heavier than normal work load for me.

Should run perfectly fine