Going back to XP? Vista has been out a while now and what I see in the magazines and talking to other techs is that Vista has fallen way short of expectations. It is a giant resource hog needing twice the RAM to run what XP did. A lot of the same information is just hidden in new ways to give you a nice learning curve in finding it. And don't you just love that little window that pops up and keeps asking you, " are you sure"? When you turn the window off, you get the red shield on your task bar that keeps wanting you to turn the thing back on! A lot of my old software just will not run on Vista. Delorme Street Atlas 2007 is for XP and below and I just bought it last year. So off to Best Buy to get the 2008 version. This has happened several times. Try running earlier version of QuickBooks YUK!!! PC Magazine has a three page article this month with detailed instructions on how to go back to XP or dual boot with XP and Vista. This makes for some good reading. For those of you that are running XP with Service Pack 2.... FYI Service Pack 3 is available now. Of course it is hidden away and you have to look for it. There is a 38kb download that adds a key to your registry. Reboot and run windows update and SP3 will then show as a critical update. My download was 66Meg. It has some security updates and PC Magazine noted some improvement in speed. Try this link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=114f3599-12af-42b2-aab1-b969a62c68a7&DisplayLang=en  choose "Release Candidate 2. That is the very small download that adds a key to your registry. As a Stock holder I was expecting Vista to be a breath of fresh air as an OS. It is beginning to look more like Millennium! PS. If you are buying a notebook with Vista get 2gigs of RAM. I know it adds some bucks to an already expensive buy, but with Vista it is a "gotta have".