Maybe I'm succombing, maybe I'm lazy, most likely I don't want to mess with it. 

 I found some instructions for nLite, a utility that will build a custom XP install, including the SATA drivers, but as I was looking through the new machine and checking out the utilities, I got a bit nervous. Apparently Toshiba won't support the install of XP and there are all sorts of audio and video drivers for the new laptop. I hate having to dig through and find them and I had an issue with my desktop actually with DELL specific drivers. I'm still not sure everything's right and I definitely had audio recording issues with it.

 A laptop is just a tool for me. I'm not really entranced by the technology and I rarely do things just for the cool factor anymore. I'm too busy with too many production deadlines to want computers to do much more than just work for me. I'm slightly different with a VM or lab machine where I can tolerate some flakiness, I'm trying to figure something out or see how it works, etc. But with my main machines, I'm pretty conservative because issues with the stability or operation cause problems with the creative process.

 And that's really what I do know.

So, I'm going to try and upgrade to Vista Ultimate, in place from Vista Home Premium, and see how it works. I don't have a lot of tolerance if I have issues, but I have an external USB drive that I'll use to store video and other files, so I'll have my work backed up if I need to rebuild the machine from scratch. 

To some extent I'm being caught in the Microsoft machine, upgrading against my will because of new hardware. And the old software is so old, in this case 2001, that it doesn't run properly on the new hardware with SATA drives. I'm not thrilled, but I've had so many Microsoft guys tell me on the side that Vista works for them that I'll give it a chance. I think I'd have more complaints from them if it was unusable.

Already the authorization process isn't too bad. It's popping up when I don't expect it and it changes the way I work with things, but I'll give it a real chance over the next month or so and if it's an issue, I'll dig further into the issues with putting XP on the Toshiba, including calling Tech Support and seeing if they'll send me an image on a recovery disk.