recommend i order my 8510p with vista?

with Vista Business and then have it double boot so that i can use Win XP too? or should i choose one over the other

 

That's sorta personal preference right there. If you can pull it off, go for it.

 

Oh well it'll be primarily for school (college) and gaming...and recomendations?

 

The best idea is to get XP OEM cheap if you don't already have it, and buy the Vista version for the future.

UAC and Vista not believing you're actually an administrator even if you're part of the security policy group is annoying on a laptop I find. Actually, I gave up on it in less than 36 hours and just installed XP.

XP just fits a laptop so much better than a bunch of fluff with indexing.

 

Yeah, Just go with XP. I switched and couldn't be happier. The performance is amazing.

 

go get vista... you can "get" xp almost anywhere... and vista is futureproof...

people might prefer xp now but give them a year (takes a while for a billion+ of apps to take the plunge too)... they'll jump on soon enough

 

I haven't had a ton of time to mess around with Vista, but I've been getting a bit frustrated with it. The only reasons I get frustrated is because I don't know my way around and I'm trying to adjust settings and learn Vista, as sordid says Vista's is really f*ing annoying when it comes to asking if you want to run something, and I just found out that Vista 64-bit doesn't allow you to install unsigned drivers (the work around is hitting F8 when you boot and then selecting the option to be able to run unsigned drivers, but you have to do this every time you reboot). I mean every OS is sketchy when it first comes out, and Vista just needs some time to mature. The reason I like it is because it has a lot more driver support for 64bit than XP 64 bit.

 

I ordered my 8510p last friday with XP, even though Vista Business was an option.

I'd much prefer the brave souls to work out the kinks with Vista and just upgrade later.

When the future comes and I'm ready to move with Vista, I'll have a capable machine ready to go. Even though I'll have to buy the Vista CD by then, I wouldn't mind -- it'll give me a way to get a clean install.

 

In retrospect, the time I spent tweaking Vista to get it running faster would probably have been equal to the time it took to install XP w/ slipstreamed SATA drivers AND find a way to get the latest ATI drivers working there as well.

Now that I'm in the middle of school I'm stuck with Vista, but I must admit after disabling all the crap, it runs pretty well. If I could do it again I might have just kept XP and avoided the hours of tweaking, however