I don't get it? Maybe it's just me but I never have a problem with my Windows PC waking up or becoming sluggish.

The only time I ever reboot is when there's a major Windows Update or an upgrade to iTunes.

I have had two notebooks. One with Windows XP and one with Vista and I never had a problem with either as far a reliability or performance.

I think as long as you get the right hardware you're fine!

You know, the big issue seems to be drivers with Vista. I had a number of problems with my X60 that I had for MONTHS. Tried everything known to man. Had components replaced. And then one day I noticed a driver for a USB microphone that I'd tried but given up on. I removed it, and all my problems went away. My tablet goes to sleep and wakes up quickly now -- every time. I don't know how Microsoft is going to resolve this, but from now on, when Windows tells me a driver is not signed and may cause problems, I'm going to listen and take note of it. I believe I was warned about this when I intially installed the USB microphone driver (which was written for XP), but I'm used to ignoring the warnings and promtly forgot all about it.

That's Apple's advantage. They control the whole process of the computer purchasing experience. They design the software and then choose the hardware that goes into their machines.

Microsoft on the other hand has to design their OS to work with a multitude of hardware configurations.

So true. My wife has a mac portable about a year old. About 5 seconds after she opens it she is typing in a new internet address into her browser. After my Lenovo x61t has been rebooted it can take about 15 seconds. If it has been up for a while and it has been running things like outlook it can be over a minute. And if my lenovo had been driving another screen or I've switched to/from tablet mode when I put it to sleep, then it can take more than a minute and a half - and sometimes the screen never comes on: I have to sleep it and wake it up again.

And if I ask it to lock the screen -- it seems like Vista locks the screen as the laptop is wakeing up, not going to sleep - so I have to wait while it swaps in all the lock stuff, the finger print reader, etc. - why not do that when it is going to sleep?

MS records how long each driver takes to turn on/off - so they could work on diagnostics for that. In my case, I suspect drivers are causing some of the problems. But the shear amount of disk activity after the compute rwakes up leads me to think there is a more basic design flaw.

It would be "fun" to run the sysinternals tool that records all file i/o when a portable wakes up to see what the heck it is doing... I've just not gotten around to it.