Overall Vista is not that good so far. It has too many annoying features, it eats up your ram by a hell of a lot, Hardware doesn’t run well on Vista,Rebooting a Vista machine is supposed to be faster, but it actually takes longer to reboot than XP, it decreases your fps a hell of a lot in games,The sidebar is another resource hog. Well the good of vista is that it has dx10 support, a whole new skin layout whatever you want to call it. If your looking fro a computer in reliability and speed, i would go with xp. Other than that you can give Vista a try.

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AMD Athlon 64x2 4400 2.3ghz..... 2Gigs DDR2 240-pin DIMM.....BFG Nvidia 9800 GT 512MB.....320GB Seagate HDD.....Corsair VX 450w PSU.....Dell 20" E207WFP 1680x1050 resolution.....Windows XP Pro SP3 x86.....Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Hi RKnutson and welcome to PCWorld.

Okay, as you can expect, you are going to get a lot of varied and passionate responses regarding upgrading to Vista or sticking with XP. If I may add my two cents on this subject.

As you can see by my signature line, I just finished a major upgrade and, in doing so, have Windows Vista and Windows XP in a Dual Boot setup. Personally, I really like Vista. At first, I was not too impressed; however, as time went on, I definitely see the performance difference between Vista and XP. Now, I must stress, as everyone else has said, your computer system resources must be sufficient enough to run Vista smoothly.

Now, concerning your file on the Western Digital external drive. The location of the files, or even the type of file, has no bearing on whether or not Vista will be able to successfully open the file. For example, if you currently have Office 2007 installed under an Windows XP setup and would like to access the files within Windows Vista, you need to install Office 2007 under the Windows Vista Operating System.

Since you, and I would gather to say the vast majority of the computer world, has become accustomed to Windows XP, it will take some time for you to become acclimated with Windows Vista. If you truly do not want Vista, there are certain things you need to realize before you downgrade to Windows XP. This Document will show you all you need to know about how to downgrade from Windows Vista to Windows XP.

If your laptop has both the system resources and the hard drive space, you can consider a Dual Boot setup. Now, when I say system resources, I mean a minimum of 2GBs of RAM and at least 160-250GB of hard drive space. Since you have not told us your laptop's manufacturer and model number, we cannot tell you whether or not your computer can handle a Dual Boot set up.

By the way, I posted this using the Windows Vista portion of my Dual Boot system.

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This is my personal Dream PC: http://forums.pcworld.com/blogs/mphenterprises/2007/12/21/my-gift-to-myself

There is another problem. Many of the newer laptops by HP, Dell and others are using the Intel 82801HEM/HBM SATA ACHI Controller to access the HD and the BIOS is severly crippled. My HP dv9500t has no user changable options in the BIOS. Thus the ACHI feature cannot be turned back to IDE, and XP simply halts after loading all the files into memory. It reports that no HD can be found and restarts the machine.

Now this is not a problem for me as I did not actually intend to install XP on this laptop (Vista supporter as I am), but was Intellectually Intrigued about whether it can be done. I know for a fact that XP Pro SP1 and XP Home SP2 (HP provided original CD's) will not load. I have a copy of XP Pro SP2c coming, I will see it that will work. Otherwise there is a convoluted possible workaround but this may only be available for HP machines as the referenced Softpac should only run on HP branded machines.

This explains why the aftermarket MB's installed in cases do not seem to have the problem of installing XP with SATA HD's (as in the case with my Gigabyte P35 board with an even newer chipset). Manufacturers limit the options in the BIOS to limit the amount of problems they have to solve through Tech Support. My HP Media Center has a limited BIOS, but at least it does have some options.

All the more reason to "roll our own" in the desktop world, but in the laptop world we are more limited.

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Thanks to Solar Wings for the special siggy.

I suspect it is also a function of what kind of laptops one can build on your own. I don't believe that you can do very slim, sleek custom laptops. They tend to be the more "powerful" ones that are potentially desktop replacements, not ones that "road warriors" would want.

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[soapbox] Backup = good...No backup = bad!! [/soap box]