I didn't pay anything for this Vista key, it came with the laptop. It's Home Premium and I hate it because it takes too much system resources. It's got a bunch of useless crap that I will never use, so why let it bog down my crappy X2 tk-53 processor with 1gb of ram? I can't upgrade this because it's a notebook and both memory slots are taken.
I hear ye'...1GB of RAM with Vista is unusable. I disabled everything - all animations, lowered the res, disabled aereo nonsense etc...but it made no difference.
Then I bought a pair of gigs from Newegg... 2* 1GB, ended up costing $70 shipped. Now it works great... so if you can, just toss the 2x 512's and get 2GB - it's WAY worth it.