This is a tough question right now. In a year, it will not be as tough. At the moment, Vista is having some troubles with good drivers to run certain devices. While only time will remedy this situation it makes for tough decisions whether to switch to Vista or not. My advice is to go ahead and purchase a laptop with XP loaded but has the capability of running any Windows Vista edition that you are interested in so that when you decide to upgrade, you won't have to perform any PC upgrades as well.