Or, go with a good Linux install and not need a muscle car under the hood. Machines that are long in the tooth get a new life with Linux. MS products since the beginnng never made sense to me but I started with Xenix and then went to UNIX and each time I tried an MS OS, just shook my head in the end and went back. I do respect Bill for his early business model and foresight that put a universal computer operating system model out but was more an oppurtunity than anything else.
As for Vista, I've seen it on a couple of computers where the owners were doing anything but praising it. Like most MS OS, I immediately thought of the Chevy Vega and Corvair. By the time it finely works, its gets discontinued for another product where the public becomes the testbed and recipient of crap until after recalls, next year's improved model, addons, etc. it almost is viable. I would buy into your Vista is built for the future but we work in the now and our equipment is from the now. Interesting to see more copanies are now offering XP again as original installs as an option to Vista. Has to be happening for a reason and it is not b/c they'd particularly like to, I suspect but are finding resistance to Vista by the larger buyers.
As for XP, I will agree that after the years of it being out it is finally a decent product. Not great but very decent. Why MS just does not continue to improve on it through update releases, oh, stupid me, if they did that Bill might not be able to take a vacation. I'll never figure out why on 2 machines it neve is quite the same as to the interface and operation; not talking about added computer software which these machines do not use except for interface drivers such as video card.
When Bill said he could not see why anyone would need more than 640k, he was right but, he made sure they would need it.
I have XP, Mac OS X and Linux systems and if I could get a couple of software vendors to support other then MS, I'd not have XP and have to worry everytime I do one of the updates if the computer is going to not start and I have to wrestle my way back into a preupdate configutation - happened 2 weeks ago again so XP is still far from stable.