vista vs. XP

I've been on Vista for a good 6 months or so now, and overall, I like it - it's slicker than XP, and the Aero stuff is cool (if you have a powerful graphics card - watch out for this if you upgrade). 

The one thing that I preferred about XP was the 'My Nework Places' shortcuts - in Vista, navigating to network locations is a bit long-winded, and not as wysiwyg as XP.

Keep XP until you have no choice. Vista will eat up twice as much memory, has more compatibility problems and in general runs slower... of course it is pretty and is getting better with each update... but hold onto XP as long as you can.

There will never come a time when he 'has no choice' but to switch to Vista as Microsoft is already working on the release of the next Windows. But yes the fact is that if memory constraints are a concern than definitely keep XP. Aside from the aforementioned bells and whistles there is nothing remarkable about Vista (but I like it).