Hi Rfinnery, i seen some were that you need 2 gigs of Ram just to run Vista, [properly] i would imaging, considering the better quality media it would most likely need it.
Have you heard of that program nLite for Win 2K or XP ? i used it on a machine not that long ago, it only had 256 mb/SD ram, pent 3/733ghz i think, it was painfully slow, i used nLite program on it and it absolutley flew, running XP/sp2 OS, you knows, they may make one up for Vista one day.
nLite may help Notebooks too, the program is designed to takes the bulkyness out of the operating systems and has some really good system tweaks, so it should have some impact on CPU activity, also going in to statup and unchecking the programs you really don't need to be running in the back ground [ except all antvirus programs, of course ] anyone that is not confident doing this, should not attempt it, if in doubt don't uncheck anything, but for the anyone that is, just press start, run and type msconfig then click on the startup tab.