Originally Posted by
PTravel
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).
It's not an inexpensive option, but you CAN always buy a retail copy of XP Pro and blow away Vista; virtually any laptop available today will initially have been available with XP on it, so if it's a decent manufacturer's business line machine XP drivers should be available on their web site.