While it seems that it may not suit the personal feelings of a lot of people, computer manufacturers are now incessantly moving towards shipping machines with Vista pre-loaded. This doesn't worry me one bit, but for some it does.
The answer - run Vista for all day to day stuff such as internet access and email. Also use it for applications you know work extremely well on it such as Photoshop and such. For those apps which you've found require specific XP drivers to control hardware devices that seem only to work under XP..... then run XP AS WELL - at the same time.
I have just downloaded Sun's "VirtualBox" - a FREE virtual host application which allows you to run any Intel-specific operating system on your machine alongside Vista.... such as XP or Linux. I have a 2GHz machine with 1Gb of RAM, so it's no powerhouse, but it seems to run very well with the two operating systems running simultaneously.
At this very moment I'm running on my Vista box the following:
Thunderbird mail
Firefox 3 browser (3 windows with 8 tabs each)
Photoshop CS3
Sun VirtualBox with an instance of XP Home edition running IE6
The machine is still very usable, with hardly any performance hit at all. OK - it's not as spritely as it is without a virtual machine running, but it's still very quick.
Installation and setup is a BREEZE. Install the program, create a "virtual" disk via the menus, enable its access to your systems DVD drive, pop your old XP disk in and select "start". It starts the XP installation in its own sizable window and hey, presto! You're running XP alongside Vista at the same time - just like yo'd run any other app. The disk space allocated to any virtual machine can be fixed or left dynamic - so it grows as you need it to.
I acknowledge that there have been many other virtual host applications out over the years (VirtualPC being one), but this one is totally FREE and runs extremely well. It's also the easiest to setup by FAR.
So - you can buy your new machine running Vista - and simply load XP to run when you want to. If you go outside and want to run K3CCD or PHD Guiding with that old webcam, then fire up XP and go for it. It works!
You can get VirtualBox from
http://www.virtualbox.org.
Depending on your machine (and the way Vista is installed), get the 32 or 64-bit version.
Have fun! I am - and I'm just installing Fedora Core 9 onto another virtual disk so that I can run Vista and Linux simultaneously - without having to dual-boot into one or the other. Very nice!
