Please don't buy Vista. My laptop came with Vista installed and it has the bare system requirements for it. I've had it little over a year and it's slow and sluggish because there isn't enough memory to run everything. You will have this problem pretty much straight away because your system is designed for XP and most likely won't have the minimum requirements needed to run Vista.
Firstly I suggest you go through your add/remove programs and uninstall anything in there that you don't use... and uninstall the anti virus you brought too, I forget who said this a couple of posts up, but her BF is right, it really does slow your system down and even with a customised install and putting the bare esstentials on it will still bog everything down.
Next I would check the RAM on your system and maybe see about getting an upgrade. It's really not expensive to buy and it's relatively easy to install although places don't tend to charge much for installing memory anyway.
Another thing to look at is how much space you have on your hard drive? Mine was crammed with photos and videos and I moved them all onto another drive to free up the main drive so there was just programs on there.
Last week I also changed how much virtual memory I had and surprisingly that made a HUGE difference.
I've done all this in the past week because for two weeks I was having major issues with over heating, stalling, freezing, shutting itself down, etc... it's made all the difference and now runs just as well as it did the day I purchased it... I wish I wasn't so lazy otherwise I would of done all this before now.
