One of my colleagues (not a Microsoft employee) told me yesterday he had downgraded from Vista to XP. I asked him why, and he told me that, although Vista is a really innovative OS features-wise, he had major performance problems, his hard drive was spinning endlessly, startup took about 15 minutes and so on.

Actually, I must confess I had the same experience with Vista when I just got my new machine. I tried everything, including some angry internal mails.to no avail.

But then, while doing some routine maintenance, one of our OTG guys told me I had a major problem with my hard drive. It's not that the HD had a defect. It was simply not built for the high speeds Vista required. He told me also that this HD is no longer sold together with the laptop I'm using, and there is a new one.

The day after my HD was replaced with a new, shiny one and voila - all the problems have gone! As simple as that. My HD is no longer revving itself to death, applications start instantly, startup time had degraded from 10 minutes to less than 2 minutes, and so on. Actually, I showed these performance to some XP fanatics I know, and they were really overwhelmed.

So, before you consider downgrading, take a look at the HD. Perhaps all your problems are lying there.