I took the plunge and upgraded to Vista. I was pushed into an upgrade after I had a run-in with a faulty hard drive.  I was barely able to recover the system, at least most of my settings were intact.  I made a copy of my hard drive partition and ran the compatibility test. Other than a few utilities I didn’t need, my hardware was ready to upgrade.  The nice thing about Vista is it captures settings, uninstals Windows XP, installs Vista, and reapplies you settings.  This process cleaned up all my problems I was impressed until I started getting BSOD on my video card driver.  So I uninstalled the driver, downloaded and tried to upgrade the video driver.  Turns out my video card 5700LE “works” on Vista, but is not supported by NVIDIA on Vista.  I’m able to use the system using essentially Vista’s generic video driver.  Lesson learned would be get Vista if you are buying a new PC.  I would not upgrade until you have a better idea if your hardware is not only compatible, but certified.

In other news, Microsoft will provide it’s own soda to anyone who has a BSOD. Oh wait,  that offer was retracted – it would cost them too much.