[Bungleau]

Two thoughts...

First, with a laptop you are committed to the graphics card for life. Good graphics and long battery life are diametrically opposed, so the odds of getting both in the same machine are somewhere between slim and none.

Second, I've been running Vista for over a year on my work machine. If I could, I'd bust it back to XP in a heartbeat. Not that Vista is necessarily bad, but even a year later, I'm *still* running in to driver and compatibility issues... and there don't appear to be any real fixes on the horizon. Since this is my work machine, I don't play games on it, so I don't have any perspective for you there.