I don’t normally have the patience for windoze anymore either. Usually I run openSuse 11.1. Although right now I’m running the mobile version of Mac OSX.
I have vista on another part, and it boots, or gets to the login prompt fairly quickly, but still takes a lot of time loading stuff after logging in. And don’t get me started on it’s screen/power saver issues. The damn thing keeps coming out of sleep. I’ve turned off wake on LAN and everything I can think of, and it still does it.
Try Win 7. I know many are saying it’s Vista redux, but I find it to be the first MS OS since Win 2k that I like.
Besides my own, I’ve done 11 installs, one of which is on a Dell 4400 P4 1.8, 512 MB, and no one has anything bad to say about it yet.