Standard installation of Vista Home Premium 32bit (no customizing) has 150+ services on it.

Now, 90% of the stuff on that E-Machine probably uses some additional services, in addition to dashboards and junk..

The older machine with half the ram may have been slightly faster...

Video.

But honestly, its probably the difference of installation junk.

A clean install is going to run faster 100% of the time versus some department store image.