Thanks, RockynBullwinkle, I'll give it a go. One last question. I'd heard a lot of bad about Vista in the early days so I put off getting a new machine. This one has Vista and seems to run OK but despite having a 64 bit triple core CPU and 3 Gigs of Ram, it runs no faster than my old machine. I tend to click on link after link trying to keep up with current events, (stock meltdown) and at about 20 web pages the screen freezes. Same as my old XP.

IF I bought a new Vista machine, could I use my old computer's recovery disks to piggyback XP onto the new drive?

I only know some of the current jargon because naturally, I started to look at buying a new machine. All the vendors say that Vista is a resource hog and the faster machines were needed just to make it at least as useful as the old XP.

If that's the case, what was the point of Vista? Aside from being very pretty, I see no advantages.