I haven't been around here much, but I must tell my friends here--

If you have an older machine, don't bother upgrading to Vista. While my 2003-vintage PC ran Vista Original Flavor well, as soon as I added the SP1 update, things went to...well, you know where things go.

Original Vista was stable over weeks. SP1 -- multiple crashes within a day, guaranteed. Apparently something to do with the power management at the BIOS level. There were no newer BIOS updates available, and Vista SP1 could not be adjusted to avoid the problem. In effect, Vista SP1 is likely to have a hardware incompatibility with older machines.

If you got Vista on new hardware, you're probably in good shape.

If you upgraded from XP to Vista, you have everything you need to go back.

If you were running something earlier than XP and bought an upgrade from Microsoft, you may be in luck. If the Vista Upgrade was either Business or Ultimate, your license allows you to DOWNGRADE to XP Pro for free. You'll have to talk to live humans at Microsoft to get an XP activation code. The magic words are "exercising my downgrade rights". You can use any XP installation disk (not the restore disks some manufacturers supply). It doesn't have to be yours, because you'll be activating it with a legitimate code.

I had the XP Pro disk I'd used to upgrade my old laptop. I just used it to install XP Pro on the ex-Vista machine, and went through the activation process. All nice and legal.

Vista will never run on my old 2.8Ghz PC. XP's not nearly as pretty, but in the end pretty is as pretty does. Crashing is not good.

It's true that Microsoft is trying hard to stop support on XP Pro. I think the last date I heard was June of 2009. That doesn't mean all the XP machines will stop working then.

I figure by downgrading to XP I've bought myself two years before I must buy another computer. That'll probably be a Mac or Linux.

Ned