I would like to confirm statement by gbhall:
It seems to me that there is no point in going to Vista-32, as it is no better (many say worse) than XP-32.
I have both XP Pro and Vista Ultimate (32-bit) on one PC. Truth is I hardly ever use Vista, because a lot of my favorite games won't run on it, such as Reversi on-line with other XP users; although I certainly want it to keep up to speed on the latest MS operating systems. Also, not only is there no back-up, but
it actually stops you using certain ancillary programs which are really important.
For example, I have an HP Photosmart 7200 printer primarily because of it's photo-quality printing capability. However, Vista loads it's own drivers for this printer and
won't allow you to load the original HP program, which contains a utility that is used to configure the print heads on new ink cartridges.
In this particular instance, there is a work around because the print-head configuration memory is retained in the printer and not in the hard drive of the operating system. Therefore, I configure the printer heads using XP so it runs properly when I use it with Vista.
Ironically, instead of XP being my ancillary OS, I now use it about 80% of the time.
Having said that, Vista has other features that are extremely useful, such as the "Disk Management" utiltiy which is much more versatile than that of XP. For example, it allows you to increase or decrease the size of existing partitions... very handy if you're reloading ghost images which only reload to the original partition size. You can then adjust partition size using the MS Disk Management utiltiy. It also has a specific icon in Control Panel to turn off "Auto Play" on your CDROM drives.
I'm not claiming Microsoft did it just for me, but I took them to task about a year before Vista came out, specifically on the inability to mark partitions "Active" using the XP-Disc "Recovery Console"... they claimed in one of their KB ariticles that this could be done, and I challenged them to show me how. I also challenged them on the fact that the option to turn off "Auto Play" on the optical drives never worked properly in Win98, Win98 2nd Ed, or XP Home or Pro.
I must be honest and admit that I accused them of not listening to the feed-back from users of their programs, so I probably have to eat humble pie. Please accept this an apology MS, if you happen to read this thread... LOL!