Old specs:

P4 3 GHZ HT, 1 GB DDR 400, 6800GT, 160 GB HD

New specs:

Core 2 Duo E6600, 2 GB DDR2 667, 8800GTS 640MB, 320 GB HD

I only kept my monitor from the previous PC (Viewsonic VP191b). I plan to replace it within the next 12 months, probably by a 24 inch model.

I use a dual boot XP /Vista config. Vista isn't so bad as a lot of people claim. Once you get used to it (after one or 2 weeks), you'll start to choose it over XP.

I only had to do a few things to get rid of some really annoying stuff

1) turn of UAC. I mean really what's the point of havinh a popup each tiem you want to chnage a system setting?

2) turn off IPv6 in your network adapter. This causes conflicts with P2P programs for example. Even with it disabled, I don't get the same kind of network performance as on XP :(

3) Disable DEP for rundll32 kernel.I have no idea where this comes from , but this kept generating errors from day 1so I disabled it. No more problems.