Seen this thread a little late and have already told blade I am jealous of having an i7 already.
But there are a few comments above that are not quite correct.
Whilst core i7 is a new chip design including mmu on chip rather than on the motherboard XP will run fine and there will be no extra drivers required because it is an i7 - the motherboard will be based upon the intel X58 chipset which feature wise to the OS is the same to the operating system as the P45 chipset used by core 2 chips.
This little gem below may help Skypilot get more out of his machine and will allow blade to run XP as well as vista.
Instead of creating a dual boot machine, download vmware server from vmware (
VMware Download Center for Datacenter Virtualization, Virtual Infrastructure 3, ESX Server, and more - VMware). Mac the knife mentioned this but did not expand on this.
This software runs below the operating system when possible, Core 2 chips and I7 chips have virtualisation built in at a processor level. So what this will allow you to do is run a virtual machine in a window on your desktop of your host operating system (XP in skypilots case and vista in blades case). Within this virtual machine you will be able to install another operating system of choice and when using a chip supporting on board virtualisation the virtual machine is capable of running a 64bit operating system when the host OS is only 32bit so in skypilots case using the 3gb of ram that is idly doing nothing.
With VMWare you can do many impressive things - you can have as many virtual machines as your hardware can support before crawling, so if you ever felt like trying out linux you can do so without fear of busting your current setup.
The VMWare technology is what is used in datacenters, microsoft has their own version of this but its not so mature yet. The licence for VMWare products is free if your not using it for commercial purposes.
My recommendation for blade is to carry on with vista as a software developer I find it alot better than xp and windows 7 better still. But if there is anything you really require xp for (and I have not found a case yet) run xp in a virtual machine - if you install vmware tools on your desktop you can treat your virtual machine window just like any other window and cut and paste between the two.
Cheers