Direct link (I hope) to Asus F5R $1088 + 2G RAM $99 = $1187
http://mln.com.au/product/?itemID=261&typeID=
I spoke to a salesman at Truscott's Hifi and he said it was a bit of a hassle to change a laptop from Vista to XP, especially due to driver installs - hence the $125 fee to change it to XP, I suppose.
I was looking for an XP laptop because I was looking at 1G RAM, but with 2G it should be no problem running anything and (maybe) everything.
Is that your only concern with Vista, that it needs lots of RAM?