Darren, im a pc gamer so obviously im obsessed with performance and such, but ive just installed vista ultimate yesterday on my pc and it works perfectly, just as fast as xp pro was, and my pc is far from top of the range(AMD 64 x2 4200, 2 gigs of ram)

If you want xp go for it, i just think its abit silly buying a new pc/lappy with old software when you can get a nice new OS on it, you will probably end up forking out £140 for it in the end anyway