I'm frustrated by the on-line reviews that I'm reading because they all seem to assume that the primary comparison between XP and Vista should be in the context of gaming. I'm planning to buy a new laptop (probably this morning). I don't play computer games, but I do lots of other things that tax the OS -- lots of multi-tasking, photo editing, video editing, huge background transfers, etc. I'd really like to know how big a performance hit I'm going to take if I buy the machine with Vista instead of XP Pro (which, at this point, would be my preference, but it may not be available on some configurations I'm considering).