good to hear i'm monkey for you :-) no, really - i know, lot people have opinion like this.. in fact, i had TOO this opinion... but in feb/2008 (i think), i get burned my old notebook, so i must qickly buy new (my notebook is not only heart of my home studio, but also my worktool because i'm coder)... there was vista pre-installed on new one, and i haven't time to reinstall it (lot of deadlines, lot of work in that time;) so.. i turned off all stupid vista stuff like aero, graphical enhacements, etc .. and stared working with vista, in standart default windows skin, with plan to downgrade to XP when i will have more time.. ... but.. downgrading never happens .. more that half of year after this, i'm still under vista, no reinstall needed - verything works GREAT, stable, all softwares what i use (for example Cubase 4 studio, photoshop, flash8, ..) works faster and more stable than on my old compter (wich had almost same CPU/MEMORY/HARDDRIVE like new one) ... im very very satisfied with vista - lot more than with XP, i was never able to use XP more than half of year withou need of reinstalling it because of everything was going slow (bootup, turnoff, applications start, etc) my personal experience is, that lot of people who hate vista haven't never tried it .. or they downloaded some warez cracked version, installed it, tried it for few days without any tunning, with areo and all graphical enhancements turned to maximu on single core cpus with 512 megs of memory and then they were wondering why it doesn't work good.. ::) imho vista is best OS ever made by M$ .. i personaly doesn't much like M$ & their products, and i thought that vista is shit, but i must say i was wrong. vista is great OS for me, really stable and fast - i can't say no one bad word on v.. from now, only ONE application wasn't working correctly and this application was MIOS studio :-))) all other apps (for example MidiOX, wich is too working with midi) works great ..