Tune up software reviewed

[#1]

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/09/29/review_pc_tune_up_sofware/
this is the part which struck a chord with me

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The test system was a five-year-old Sony laptop running Windows XP Pro 32-bit. It packs a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 512MB DDR PC2100 - the upgrade was 1GB DDR PC2700 - and a 60GB 7200rpm hard drive. It last had XP reinstalled two years ago and has been used on a weekly basis since. When first installed, XP booted up in 35 seconds but it now takes over two minutes with all the junk it’s had on it over the last two years.

The conclusion I drew from the results is that the best thing is to load install windows and all the basic applications you know you are going to need then apply all the updates. Then before installing anything else including the AV etc. is to take an image so that when things start slowing down you can just reinstall the image, install all the updates them re- image.
I will be interested in other opinions on this.
One thing is interesting is this at the end of the article as my Vista system has slowed markedly since first install.

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We’ve also tested these software packages on a higher spec Vista PC, where we got some quite different results, but we’ll tell you about in an upcoming article...

[#2]

One problem I can see with the test comparison is that Windows XP when first released would run happily in 256MB.
Now, with the latest service packs and security software it really needs over 512MB to run before adding any applications.
(I always put a minimum1GB in any XP system before doing any other work at all)

[#3]

Ahh the heady days of pc's with less than 256Mb 
Although these days they expect you to use vista in 512Mb  2Gb is more like it.
(Although my first PC had 1Mb of ram, a 8086 processor and dos 3.3, I bought it because I wanted a hdd and the whole machine was cheaper than the hdd for my bbc machine)

[#4]

My first desktop had a massive HD all 25 MB of it

[#5]

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We love hardware, and if you ask us how to make an old computer go faster, we’ll recommend a hardware upgrade.

Don't know why they bothered - all they had to do was install one of the Linux distros and it wouldn't have cost a penny - less hassle too. 

[#6]

Quite agree - I installed Ubuntu in April 2007 and applied any patches as and when.
Upgraded the whole thing in situ 5 times and boot time has decreased to around 40 seconds.