Well with those specs Vista should run fine. I have a laptop that runs Vista with a few bumbs, but I get over them. The compatibility is not as big of a deal as a lot of people make it sound. Also, IMHO, I think Vista is better then XP. Although, XP does have its strong points. Like taking less resources, and being compatible with almost everything. I am a programmer, software developer, and game developer, and have no issues running all my development software on Vista. It actually comes down to more of a personal opinion on what you will use it for, and what you plan on doing with it. If you are using lots of older software, and older hardware, XP would probably be the better way to go. Right now, a lot of the compatibility bugs are worked out of the software, so most of the new stuff will run good on Vista. I would say Vista. That is just my opinion.