Okay, by that logic, I could put $5,000 worth of hardware into my 450 MHz P3's box and say that I'm running Vista Ultimate Edition flawlessly on an eight-year-old system. I'm sorry, but I call bullshit.
First of all, I never said "ultimate edition". Ultimate edtion comes with all kinds of medi features, which you wouldn't want to even think about using on a five year old box, regardless of the OS.
Second of all, all that would be needed on that example Dell box posted earlier would be a RAM upgrade, which would cost around $60.
Not $5000.With a proper amount of RAM vista sans the aero eye-candy would run fine.