Just my .02 but unless you need hardware and software on the bleeding edge of technology that will require Vista I'd stick with XP. Give it a year or two then upgrade once it's become mainstream. There's support lacking for many software applications and hardware to run it under Vista, some may never get it.

You may want to take an inventory of the software and hardware you currently have and use and make sure you'll be able to use it under Vista.

If you are familiar and reasonably happy with XP what are the benefits of Vista? What are the drawbacks? Treat it like any business decision.

MSFT dropped development/inclusion of the reasons I was looking forward to Vista aka Longhorn. Pretty just isn't enough.

Definitely go with XP for now. Vista has several problems running applications designed for XP (i.e. antivirus programs, desktop software, some device drivers, etc.) and it should be able to run those.

I'd give Vista another year or so before using it on a day-to-day basis.

Many U.S. business entities including the federal government, won't be moving to Windows Vista until early-mid 2008.

If you are planning on upgrading your hardware at some point then stick with XP.

Vista only allows for a couple of hardware upgrades then it wants you to give M$ more money. That alone is a reason not to use it IMO.

This is just my opinion.

I use my system almost 100% of the time for graphic and web design. Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Outlook all take up lots of memory, even moreso when all of them are opened at once which in my case is often the case.

I tried Vista, when it boots and gets to the desktop I go to the task manager and it was taking up 400MB, just sitting there! To me that's 400MB of memory I can use to make my design process that much faster and make things run that much smoother.

if what you do on the machine is mission critical, stick with xp for now. upgraded to vista on a 2nd machine, and had a parade of horrors with driver compatibility and software not working right. is gosh darned pretty, however.

Thanks everyone. I was leaning toward XP and now I'm convinced!

From a UK perspective - why are you buying Dell?!

I would think to buy a dell with ubuntu installed :)

why are you buying Dell?!

Because it can be ordered with XP?

Actually because we had pretty good luck with the last one we got.