Vista puts your hardware through a workout, whats the point of having 4 gigs, when your computer is only using 1.

It pre-caches programs depending on your use of them, obviously its not going to waste all your memory on calc.exe (ms calculator) if you only used it once and spend most of your computer time browsing the internet on firefox.

Vista certainly isnt laptop friendly, since it uses more system resources then is absolutely necessary.

Don't get AOL
Trust me i know, i grew up with aol, hated it from the start and every week i tell my parents to stop wasting money on AOL but they refuse to, since they dont want to lose their email accounts... even though you can access it for FREE from the aol website. Now that aol has basically sold themselves out its even worse. Aol puts out their own ads but block ads originating from websites, constant "aol is not running click here to start it" notifications.
AOL has to be the worst company ever.