I gave Vista a try last August and left it installed on my 1520. Over several months I was able to learn it, tweak it and test software. It was nice doing this without interupting my main rig which was running XP. Finally in December I was pretty happy with Vista. It proved reliable, stable and was able to get it's speed up to where XP was. I did a lot of research.

In December I put Vista back on my XPS 410. It's worked very good for me. There have been no failures. The only XP rig in the house is my wifes old machine. I've got my 1530 now and it runs really good, with no issues. I'd give it a try. After all, it really isn't that bad. Every transition to a new OS is met with transition issues and lack of willingness to use it at first.

Eventually, you will have to move to Vista. Just as all those 98 users had to move to XP.

However, if you aren't enjoying your notebook, why keep fighting. Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is coming, but already there's a lot of programs it breaks in the process. Drivers are now up for XP for most every system. I'd say move back to XP if you want to move.

I installed XP the same day I received my M1330, I had planned to do so and the computer was definitely faster.
Beforehand I bought a SATA case for a 2.5 hard drive and I removed the HD and aqtached it to a desktop PC via USB, then I used Acronis to delete all partitions on the HD. I also created a customized XP Pro SP2 installation CD where I used NLite to streamline in the Intel SATA drivers, that way it will install XP directly, if you don't include the SATA drivers you have to change the BIOS to non SATA and install the drivers once you get XP running.

Anyway, I put the HD back into the laptop and put in the Media Direct CD and booted from it (press F2 and select boot from CD/DVD), I selected option 2 and created a 40 GB partition for XP and the rest for data. Then ejected the Media Direct CD and put in my customized XP CD and booted from it. It installed without any problems recognizing the HD. Once I had XP up and running I installed all of the rest of the drivers I previously had downloaded from Dell's website plus finished the installation of Media Direct. I had to install the Microsoft HD audio drivers first for it to recognize the HD audio drivers. Except for installing the bluetooth drivers twice I have had zero problems running XP and everything works fine. I can use bluetooth to connect to my Nokia E51 and get decent internet speed on the road, webcam, fingerprint reader and sound works great. HDMI works perfect connecting to a LCD HD TV, both sound and picture. I'll wait for Vista SP2 before I touch it again (I was a beta tester of Vista and I also installed it on my wife's PC). While there are certain aspects of Vista that are superior to XP there are too many drawbacks and the lukewarm reviews for Vista SP1 does not making me want to get it yet. Besides WinXP SP3 should be out any day soon and it improves speed and includes some of the better parts of Vista.

I found all XP drivers without any problems using Dell support driver/manual download site.


Good luck

I bought my XPS in Oct.
I tried using Vista, but hated it. Also I was having a new system installed at work and the guys installing it told me to stick with XP Pro. So I did.
I use graphic software like Illustrator and on my previous system noticed it used a lot of RAM.
I noticed Vista used a lot of RAM so moving to XP was the best decision.
My laptop runs really fast and I am able to have many graphic progam's open at the same time.

sorry but not a fan of Vista yet.