Laptop with vista

Hey, I'm planning to purchase a laptop soon for college and I was wondering if I should dual boot vista / xp or just run a clean format with only XP. What are your suggestions in what I should do?

If the partitioned part of the hard drive contains the vista backup should I leave that alone and would I be able to go back to vista as long as I make a back up disk? This option is for windows XP only.

Thanks!

I say install Windows 7 RC and enjoy the best of all three worlds. Windows 7 is light and fast like XP with the good things that Vista brought and none of the bad. Not to mention Windows 7 brings a lot of wonderful things itself.

You won't be disappointed. Best of all, the RC is free until May 2010, so until 7 comes out fully, you're completely legit.

It depends on what you need to do.

Personally, if it was my laptop I would choose dualboot like this: Windows XP SP3 and Linux.

I have never really cared about Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Second Windows 7 if you have to go Windows. Rocks on my new laptop, better then Vista did, gets a higher user experience rating also. I dual boot 7 with Linux, and stay in Linux 90% of the time, so if you like linux that's and even better option.

The problem with new laptops is it is becoming harder and harder to find the drivers yourself to downgrade to XP. The laptop's my company just ordered comes with Vista x64, and no drivers from the manufacture to downgrade to XP. You would have to spend countless days googling for drivers that will work, and hope someone who has the same laptop as posted what they did to get it too work. Trust me, the CEO got a new HP tablet PC, and i spent DAYS searching for sata drivers just to get HP to see the hard disk on install. Finally gave up, and put Vista Ultimate on it for him.

The days of downgrading to XP on a new machine or just about over.