what i have heard about Vista is that there is a lot of security stuff built into it. thats why it needs like a gig of memory to run. so i think u will need atleast 2 gigs installed in order it to work decently. there are different levels to vista also, i guess the better one probably use more memory up. i still think XP professional is the way to go, until they iron out some bugs and updates, patches and stuff. plus you may need to get updates for yur old software to work with vista too. best of luck with vista anyway, but if u have an old copy of XP and have all that memory load (2gig) u will be good to go with that.