[CyberShot]

I've personally found vista to be fine, I have full blown vista with all the unneeded extras on my desktop computer and I still don't get why people complain so much. Vista is basically as cheap as XP now, and memory management and the prefetch is actually very useful.

However on my laptop (A few years old) I wanted to reformat so I decided I might as well go for vista, and I decided to download a torrent of a "lite vista". Basically it's a vista with all the crappy services pulled out, for example bluetooth and network printer sharing. You can download them services if you need them.

On my laptop with 1 gig of ram vista felt like it was running faster than any fresh install of XP. So a stripped down vista might work better for you, keeping core windows improvements. Plus mine was only a 700 megabyte download, so might as well give it a spin.

However in contradiction to some people here, I think the driver problems would be absolutely minimal. If the computer is a year old, then I highly doubt any of the hardware will only have vista drivers. Most hardware companies still support windows 2000 for drivers, and if you get a newish SP3 XP installation disc it'll probably have most hardware drivers or at least a generic one which will allow the device to work on.

Make sure you've downloaded the XP driver for your ethernet card, or wireless card before you install XP. So if they aren't supported off the bat you can install their drivers. From there I'm pretty sure windows update will be able to find all your hardware drivers.