Friend who works at best buy told me that when it comes to laptops, its becoming harder to put windows XP on them, because of the wireless cards and other components not having even basic XP drivers.

That they frequently blue-screen during a Windows XP install on the newer laptops, yet go through a Vista install, just fine.

But as I don't deal much with laptops, I'm not sure how trustful this is.

If you go vista, just make sure you double your RAM from XP, or even triple.

1gb will handle most non-gaming needs on a laptop for XP. 2 or 3 is needed for vista.