To be honest I havent heard a good word said about vista. I use my PC for mainly gaming, and the lads I know who installed vista had endless problems with drivers etc etc.

I skipped from XP ( very good Imho ) straight to 7 ultimate and to be honest it was a really good move. Driver support is excellent and with my machine it flies.. and for an operating system I thought it was pretty cheap

I know how frustrating it can be with a slow PC, im sure loads times seem longer than what they actually are.

I use to buy pre built systems but I found that they were just cases full of not very good components. I prefer to build my own systems now ( not the cheapest way ) but at least you can spec them to exactly what you use a computer for.

If you want you computer to run fast then take a good look at what components you have inside.