I never had a problem with Vista the entire time I used it. I had Vista Ultimate on a machine I built 4 years ago with a 2.2Ghz Athlon 64 X2 and 4 GB of RAM and there was no slowness whatsoever. It actually ran faster on that machine than Windows 7 Pro does on many of the new laptops at our office with Core i5 and 4GB of RAM. In my opinion, the majority of the problems people experienced with Vista were due to PC manufacturers, in a rush to keep up, simply slapped 'Vista capable' and 'Designed for Vista' stickers on machines that really weren't designed for it, and software companies dragged their feet in making applications compatible with the OS, and as a result the end user got bad performance and a bad experience all the way around. By the time Windows 7 was released, companies had spent 2-3 years making software compatible with Vista, which made them compatible with Windows 7, and lo and behold Windows 7 looks like Microsoft's OS savior.

To get back on topic, I couldn't agree more with #3 in the article. If your system supports it, and you can afford it (which is getting easier), go with an SSD. If nothing else, get a smaller, less expensive SSD to load your OS and programs on and keep your current drive for pictures, files, etc.