XP or Vista for my purposes?

I just bought an M1530 because I'll be travelling a fair amount over the next couple years. While away, I will use the laptop almost exclusively for the following purposes: working with MS Office (Word and Powerpoint), internet access, webcam to VTC with my family, and a fair amount of playing Age of Empires III.

I've already followed the excellent guides here for fresh Vista install and tweaked it a bit, and also installed the nvidia 174.60 driver and OC'd my 8600GT by a modest 5 points on each clock. I'm convinced (but not certain) XP would run significantly faster than Vista, although I haven't installed Age III yet to see if I'm unhappy with Vista's performance on that game.

Given the purposes my laptop serves, would XP "fly" compared to Vista such that it would likely be worth the several hours necessary to perform an XP install from an OEM CD? I think the only issue I would have is Vista's performance on Age of Empires III. I suspect the Vista performance will be acceptable; Age III is hardly the intense resource hog that many other games folks play on their 1530s are, but I don't know for sure. I'd rather not install Age III and go through the registration process if I get recommendations that I'll need XP to have a satisfying game experience.

I apologize if this seems misplaced. I looked at the OS forum and the post seemed to fit better here than there.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

 

This should go in the Windows OS section, (maybe a mod will move it), but i would say that if you give vista an honest chance, it is fine. You wont notice a difference between the two operating systems.

 

It's most probably not worth the work.