Oldtimer, I was like you at first (I'm an oldtimer too), not really seeing the "lure" of Vista. I first saw Vista on a laptop belonging to someone else. We were at a training session, and he had just gotten it several days before. This was the first weekend in February, so there were'nt a lot of people around who knew much about it. We struggled to find things.

The lure is the improved graphics. Far superior to XP, but at a price of more memory and more capable video cards. Of course for a while, you can buy a system that at one time came with XP but now comes with Vista, remove the HD, install a replacement and install XP. I did that with my older HP when it came with XP. I took the HD out, replaced it and installed Win2K. About six or eight months later, I put the original HD back in, converted to XP and haven't looked back.

Of course you could always build you own. Your problem is going to come in about six or eight months when there are no XP drivers for the new devices that will be on the market. As the installed base of XP shrinks, manufacturers and chip producers will not want to spend the money to write new drivers for a shrinking OS base.

Just try to install Win98 on a new machine. It would be a real exercise to get the drivers, if you could. HP has notices on their drivers and downloads pages that Win98/ME drivers and CD's are no longer available for some of their older items.

I go back to Dos 1.1 and a 64K IBM PC with dual 5 1/4" 360K floppies. It did have a multi-function board that had the LPT port and 512K additional memory to take it to the max of 576K. You couldn't put 640K on one until they come out with the 256K MB also used in the XT with the 10 MB hard drive! We thought we had all kinds of room. I have the shell of an Pentium II machine in storage - 96MB memory, CD ROM, Zip drive, but no HD. Memory is 32MB and 64MB 168pin Dram modules! Dates on some of the items are 1999, and I don't even think I can find a HD small enough to install. My old 8GB is on a 98SE machine with 512MB of ram.

I'm in the process of building a new machine, but it will be Vista. Just what I need - another computer! Five years from now when rumors of the "New" Windows operating system are floating around we will wonder what all the fuss is about.

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You can still get XP Pro on business systems from HP and Dell. They have commited with MS to offer XP Pro on new systems to the business community for at least until Feb, 2008.

Course at work were still running Windows 2000 Pro (Win2K). Even there, though, even with the HD images that Enterprise locations use they are going to run out of time as the devices are no long responsive to the older drivers. But for now, XP is alive and well in that market.

Companies have large investiments in legacy devices that must be connected, and in our case proprietary custom written software. Making major software changes is not something a company does quickly for it run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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