Hi Roger, I have Vista Home edition on my laptop and this I purchased separately and loaded myself onto a clean laptop hard drive.
I did this after hearing and reading a lot of reports that the Vista editions that are loaded in the factory are the systems with all the faults and problems. whether this is true or not I can happily say that I have never encountered any problems at all with my system.
The main astro programs that I run are:
MaximDL with DSLR plugin.
Star Atlas Pro.
Registax V4
Astroplanner
Deep Sky Stacker
Meade Envisage
Paintshop Pro V10
DSUSB check
Everything has been running smoothly for over a year now and I very happy with the whole setup and it's happily intergrated with the Canon 400D, DSI II and the LX200R.
My laptop is an Acer Aspire Duo core 1.73GHz, 120GB HDD and 1GB ram which I'm also very happy with although if anything I would like to add another 1GB of ram to make it a bit speedier.
Hope this helps.
Cheers
