Fran, welcome to the club! I got a laptop recently too (they ALL come with Vista nowadays by the way ), and mine happens to be a Centrino 2 Core 2 Duo P8400 with Windows Vista Premium 64bit, 4 Gigs of DDR3 RAM, 17" Widescreen, a 7200 RPM Western Digital HD, mini Firewire, an eSATA port for eSATA capable external Hard Drives, a DVD RW Drive, built in Wi-Fi, and the list goes on. And all for a terrific price I might add.

Funny.. right after I got my Laptop, Microsoft comes out with Windows 7 Beta 7000 and makes it available to the public for download. Since I've heard such good things about it I went ahead and downloaded it and installed it onto a separately created partition on my Hard Drive. So I'm running a Dual boot setup with Vista Premium and Windows 7 Ultimate. After installing Windows 7 I find I am using it more and more and "rarely" go into Vista at all anymore. Vista is a resource hog of course and I have found Windows 7 much speedier and overall a much better and user friendly experience to work with. It's not near the resource hog as Vista is either which is good. After installing Windows 7 I had to search my laptop manufacturers website for a driver for my LAN port because initially I wasn't able to get online using Ethernet. I got that resolved fairly quickly though. Everything else seems to work fine so far, at least as far as I can tell after having used it extensively for over a month now; and as far as I'm concerned there's really no looking back to Vista for me. When Windows 7 is released (some say by the holidays '09) I will then commence to re-format my Hard Drive and install Windows 7 Professional onto my Laptop. If the price is within reason I may spring for Windows 7 Ultimate instead, but I'll have to wait and see the price difference.

Glad you're enjoying your new rig Fran! But you really need to look into Windows 7 more closely and check it out if you can. It will be the OS of the future and, in my opinion, may cause droves of former Mac owners to come back into the fold. Regardless though, Windows 7 will be "thee" best OS ever from Microsoft and the sooner you get in the thick of things with it the better in my opinion. Vista will most likely hang around for quite a while and may get a couple more service packs, etc., but soon there is going to be a huge paradigm shift towards Windows 7 and you don't want to be left behind, if you know what I mean.

All the best,
Mike

[This message has been edited by keybplayer (edited 02-10-2009).]