Generally, I've had pretty good luck with HP products, and was delighted with this machine until the video signal died. However, after weighing all the alternatives, I've decided to ship it back to HP for m/b replacement - Cost just under $300.

My experience with Vista is not encouraging.

1. Old help files no longer work
2. Flash runs poorly
3. Games run poorly or not all
4. Audio aps have limited or no functionality.
5. It can slow to a crawl with the disk churning away on indexing, and all the eyecandy is a drain on the cpu - not the way it was supposed to be.

Audio-wise, I can do things in ME on an 866 PIII that I can't manage with a brand new laptop and Vista. Some of the features are nice in Vista, but its shortcomings make it unsuitable for my needs. My remaining decision is whether or not to eat the $90 restocking fee at BB and get that wretched "operating system" out of my life for good.

As for dual booting, it's possible, but the changeover from ATA to SATA drives means that the XP setup routines may not be able to "see" the newer drives, so it's no walk in the park there either.

I feel snookered at every turn with Vista, and I'm going to spare myself replaying some of the more recent bizarre behavior of that thing....

I want my XP back.
S