There's nothing wrong with Vista and I think you should look a little deeper for your problem. I went with my girlfriend last week and she purchased a Toshiba Satellite laptop with Vista Home Basic Edition, 2GB RAM, 200GB Hard drive. First thing I did was remove Norton 360 through control panal/uninstall and then install AVG Anti-Virus. She wanted Photoshop installed, no problem. Next was Microsoft Office 2007, started installing and bam computer shuts down completely. I think heat, you know that they are always warm on the bottom, but no as long as there is a little clearance on the bottom for air, they'll run for hours and days on end. Decided to uninstall the trial of the preinstalled Student Microsoft Office thinking there was a conflict with the Pro version I was trying to install, went to control panel/uninstall and tried to remove the student version, bam again computer shuts down completely. Did a search on the internet for vista shuts down and the best info I could find was that it's programs running in the background causing conflicts. I remembered the Norton Removal Tool and downloaded, ran and removed all traces. Went to msconfig and took a look at the programs running at startup and thus running in the background, installed CCleaner ccsetup209_slim.exe, my preferred tool (Tools/Startup) for disabling startup and unnecessary programs from running in the background. After that Microsoft Office installed perfect and the machine has never shutdown again. Next time I have the laptop, all the bundled software is coming off, who needs it. So what I'm saying is that there is a conflict with a program that's running in the background and whatever you're doing at the time the machine shuts down. Duel boot is fine, you'll need an XP disk, $100 or less. Make a separate partition to install it on. Really very simple, less than an hour if you know what your doing. With a duel boot, you're given the choice or either booting into XP or Vista or set one as the default. I have both, doesn't matter which I use, both perform equally. First thing I'd do is remove all the bundled software that came with the machine that you don't need, especially Norton that comes preinstalled with the Toshiba Satellite and get a good Anti-Virus program. You should also have Vista Service Pack 1 installed by now.

Found this on another forum which may help\; Microsoft has a free download for Vitural PC. With this program running in your Windows Vista 64 bit environment, you can run a Windows XP 32 bit environment, and launch an MS DOS environment from there. Additionally, you can create as many of these virtual environments as you want. Unfortunately, Microsoft requires you to have both a Windows XP licience iand a Vista Licence if you are going to run both Vista and XP (even with one in the virtual world). If you own a regerestered copy of XP, I'm told that a work around to this potential problem is to reinstall your virtual XP environment when the preceeding one experies it's 30 day registration requirement. Or; Download virtualbox from Sun for free and run a virtual instance of win xp 32bit, win vista 32bit ...I would suspect licencing for whatever os you choose ie XP or Vista would also apply after the trial period. I have never tried this , just reporting what I have found

the best thing to do is simply go to the website of those programs and see if they have support for windows 7 64 bit, some programs will run just fine on it, some just need another driver and many companies are putting out those drivers on their websites. 32-bit and 64-bit Windows: frequently asked questions If you do some searching around you can also find several places that tell you how you can get the windows xp mode to work on home premium, this is one, also windows secrets newsletter published that info in one of their newsletters a while back so you could search there or just do a google search for more info. Workaround to Install Windows XP Mode in Windows 7 Home Premium and Home Basic Create an XP Mode for Windows 7 Home Versions & Vista the 7 forums is also a wealth of info Here is a link that might be useful: 7forums

REplaced the hard drive - uh-oh. Your legally installed Windows system was on the old drive. When the replacment drive was installed, the existing system needed to be transferred to the new disk (if possible). This can not be done by a simple copy. An image of the old disk must be transferred to the new disk. Software such as "Copy Disk" is used to do this. If the old drive was failing and could not be effectively accessed, then the computer system has to be rebuilt by reinstalling the sysem from your original CD and it needs to be 'activated' from the MicroSoft site. Contact MicroSoft's web site for instructions. If you do not have the Windows original software disk, then the store from which you bought the computer may have a legal copy and should be able to reinstall for you. Look around in the material that came with your computer (when you bought it). If you do not have the Windows software, is there a "recovery disk"? Look for instructions about how to use the recovery disk. This may save you. If you can not find a way to resolve this issue, then you may be faced with buying a copy of Windows and starting over. This points out the need to make a recovery disk soon after you get a new computer.