One of most common complaints of Vista is how slow it is. It's slow to start, it's slow to operate and it's even slow to shutdown. As an example, it takes my workstation approximately 10 minutes to boot to a useable state. One of the few programs that I have in my startup folder is Microsoft Outlook 2003. Outlook doesn't even start loading until the 8 minute mark. The desktop itself takes approximately 3 minutes to fully display. You're probably thinking that I'm running a fairly slow PC. Well, I'm not. Remember, I just recently upgraded my machine and I?m now running one of Intel's latest Core i7 processors. See further down this post for more information on the type of hardware I'm running.