Hi Fmjc001, You could run Vista Ultimate quite happily on that system although as the guys mentioned a bit more memory would help.

Microsoft says for Home Premium / Business / Ultimate

• 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 GB of system memory
• 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
• Support for DirectX 9 graphics with:
  
  
  • WDDM Driver
  • 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
  • Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
  • 32 bits per pixel
• DVD-ROM drive
• Audio Output
• Internet access (fees may apply)

Additional requirements

Actual requirements and product functionality may vary based on your system configuration. Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor can help you determine which features and edition of Windows Vista will run on your computer.
While all editions of Windows Vista can support multiple core CPUs, only Windows Vista Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise can support dual processors.


You don't mention graphics, but with on-board there just isn't enough grunt for the Aero eye-candy. Also DirectX 10 is very hard on the GPU. You probably won't get any blistering speeds. Depends on your useage.

Without knowing a little more about the card, and I'm guessing it's not your computer, all I could say is that the owner won't be playing Crysis anytime soon, but I'd be pretty certain there isn't much else they wouldn't be able to do. Those specs aren't real bad. Not everybody has a high end computor and a 2ghz Core 2 Duo is not a bad little processor. As for overclocking, you can, but there is a monetary and equipment cost. You have to weigh up if it is worth it. Unless the person is a high end gamer there is no real benefit for slight gain in performance you would get. For the cost of the cooling gear you could probably get a bigger processor. An extra gigabyte of memory would improve performance though and memory is pretty cheap/

No problems then. You might have to load your movies onto the hardrive to play them if thay are AVI. DVD's seem to work ok though in the Disk Drive. My daughter has a system with similar specs and apart from being slow to load and a bit sluggish compared to a higher end system it does all her work ok. She uses Office 2007 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 primarily. Adobe can put a strain on a system and although she has no trouble she can't open too many photo's at once. Best not to use all the pretty graphic stuff that's all.