I am in the same situation. I recently purchased a new "cheapo" laptop for
my son which came pre-installed with Vista. My home computer is over 4 years
old (Pentium 4 2GHZ with 1GB RAM). The new laptop is Pentium M Celeron
1.6GHZ with 1GB RAM. Initially after windows login I compare the memory of
each system, the old desktop with Win XP Home is at 219MB, while the new
laptop with Vista Home Basic is over 400MB. When my son tries to play the
game Sims 2, the old desktop is running with the game at 50% CPU and memory
for the game is around 200MB, on the new laptop the game is at 100% CPU and
memory for the game is around 400MB. The game manufacturer says it does not
officially support Vista yet, but running the game in Win XP compatibility
mode doesn't work either. I feel that this laptop will be of marginal
performance under Windows Vista, but might actually be a good performer under
Win XP. I came to this forum to investigate downgrading to XP. I was
surprised at how many posts there are with the same question. It sounds like
Microsoft really has us over a barrel with all the licencing bull****. It
also does not surprise me that they expect me to go out and buy another
Windows license to downgrade and essentially leave my new Windows Vista
license unused! These cheap PC manufactures should have never started using
an OS before the PC hardware was capable of running it. Microsoft should
have never created such a bloated OS that uses up most of todays PC
resources, but that is typical MS. They have done the same thing with every
new OS that they created, always staying one step ahead of the hardware MFGs.
It does end up pushing the hardware MFGs to make higher performance PC's,
but on the other hand it keeps the price of new PC's high as well. I have
often wonderered how my new PC running XP would have operated under Win 2000,
but Microsoft closes that option as well by not providing support for older
OS's. Oh well, I guess that is life (at least Microsoft's version of it) I
might as well get used to it. Maybe I will try Virtual PC, but I don't have
much hope for that either since the laptop does not have much resource left
over after Vista boots up.

Frustrated Hillbilly.