My (work) laptop dual-boots between XP and Vista, and although Vista has some nice desktop widgets and things, I tend to stick to XP whenever I can. Vista is a resource hog, especially in terms of memory, so a machine that runs XP perfectly happily, with all my dev tools running, is painful on Vista. Without going into too many technical details, Vista appears to use a different memory management policy to XP, which is inferior for my usage. It also has a couple of irritating 'features' which I just can't get on with. No doubt many issues will be sorted in the service packs.

As regards 'downgrading' to XP, I would be surprised if anything in a standard laptop available today doesn't have an XP driver available. The very high-end, bleeding-edge ones might do, but even then, it's unlikely, unless they have Vista-specific features (like sideshow). I would suggest that you take some time to assemble all the necessary drivers from the 'net before you start, though! Also, be aware that there may well be warrenty issues - there was some recent press about a chap who had a hardware failure, only PC World wouldn't honour the warrenty because he'd installed Linux...

Unless the supplier is prepared to swap it out for you, you'll probably end up buying a copy of XP anyway. They are available retail, as others have said.

I would be surprised if anything in a standard laptop available today doesn't have an XP driver available

A lot of the latest Toshiba satellite laptops have an Nvidia 7300 graphics card installed. There isn't an XP driver available for this, either from Toshiba or Nvidia.

Toshiba will direct you to their website, where they say a driver is available, but it doesn't work. I've contacted the Nvidia customer support, who have confirmed that they have not made an XP driver yet.

It's not so much that there's no driver available for the 7300, it's more that it's such an appalingly useless graphics card that any self respecting machine refuses to work with it. I bought two of them buggers before I saw reason.:ugh::rolleyes::)

It's fine in a laptop, provided you don't need any extreme graphics for things like games.
For general use and DVD playing. I don't have a problem with it.

To be fair Mr. 419, you have a point. It sucked for telly but I understand it was ok on other duties.:ok: My comprehension was it was a jazzed up 6600 but I can't vouch for that tale.