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I have a love/hate relationship with Vista. Here's my experience:
Bought older model Acer PC with Vista pre-loaded. Came home and found no Microsoft disks and had to create my own recovery disks since this vendor does not provide disks with pre-loaded machines. Hate that!
Found some of my flight-sim addons did not like Vista and no support was planned. This annoyed me too.
Bought a second hard disk with Windows XP license and set-up a dual boot (using Bios configuration only, works well). I now have an XP drive and a Vista drive that happily co-exist together with Vista being the default.
I had 1GB of RAM and I upgraded to 4GB. XP is happy and sees all the RAM and allocates about 3.2 as free. Vista crashed after a few seconds of booting up. I ran in safe mode and ran msconfig and told Vista to use only 2GB. Now Vista is OK and reports 4GB and 2GB in different system properties dialogs. It looks like Vista seems to be a bit fussy with certain hardware.
Vista SP2 fails to install, something to do with third party disk management (Acer hidden recovery partition may be at fault). The web is full of Vista SP2 fails to install messages.
I am now used to it and run all my applications on it except for FS2004. I don't like the file manager and the way it handles placement of docs, pics etc. and the fact that it never seems to remember column widths and other settings.
On the plus side Vista does now have a much better movie maker with the ability to create custom DVD's. The eye candy is nice if you get Home Premium upward. Networking with an XP machine can be either easy or difficult and I had both expreriences.
For general computing you are usually better off with the latest unless you have specific needs. You will be fine with Vista.
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