Stick with XP - Don't "upgrade" to Vista. I got a new laptop a month ago and it came with Vista. It is an incredibly bloated operating system and that makes it sloooooow A 2Ghz Pentium dual-core running Vista runs about the same as a 1.6Ghz Celeron 420 running XP. That's what I used to run and I think it was faster, actually. They've also added some "features" that make it harder to use. I don't care for Vista much at all.