Do not buy a computer with Vista.
Stay with XP. Vista will decrease your performance more than more powerful HARDware (typo correction) can improve it. Vista will also cause huge aggravation.
Options:
EDIT: New Comment: I see now that you can only upgrade to 1 gb memory. that may be enough. With average use, XP does well with 1 gb and will still far outperform Vista. Your 512 mb limitation is likely causing a good part of your problem.
If 1 gb turns out insufficient, then try the netbook option below.
You can probably put 2 gb memory and a 250 gb hard drive into the computer you have. You should be able to get these parts at Best Buy for under $200 and put them in yourself. Best Buy should be able to look up your computer model and find the parts you need --- probably an IDE drive and an older kind of laptop memory.
MemTurbo will help you manage your cache and this and some other utilities can help you optimize XP so that it will way outperform newer models with vista.
The other option is to buy a "Netbook" like an Asus or Dell or MSI Wind with a mechanical HD. These come with XP and a processor comparable to yours. However, many come with only 1 gb memory and a 120 or 160 HD. You can upgrade the memory and HD on these and you should be able to get a SATA HD of 320 mb and 7200 rpm for this kind of machine. Be sure you buy one with a 2.5" HD. If it has a 1.8, it will be MUCH more difficult to upgrade.
There are many things you can do to improve XP and it has taken me years to learn them, so I can't list them all here, but what I described is a good start.
Also, note well that XP, properly optimized, will not use anywhere near 2 gb memory, no matter what you do with it, and will still way outperform Vista.
Good luck!
I have done both of these and they work very well.
Hey Naisho or soneome,
My five-year old Sony Viao notebook's performance is very slow. Vitual memory is low.
I am considering replacing my laptop with a new one.
The one I have now is specced with a 1.60Ghz Pentium M CPU and 504 MB of RAM
The new one I am looking at is specced with a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz or more CPU.
Do you think that I could replace new processor into old notebook? Performance is faster than old Premium M? should install 2 GHz or more memory (RAM) chips?