RLSH700, Jeremiah's right on this one. We're looking at '09 before we even start considering a deployment in my company.
There's no real value in Vista. In fact there was a blog on ZDnet about it becoming the next Millenium edition (if anyone remembers that). I ordered it on a Dell E521 earlier this year, dual booted between it in Ubuntu for a while, then just stopped. Not impressed. Just glitz/glam and no real payoff. Not really much safer than XP even though it does do a good job of making sure you really want to do things (it's (windows) is trying to become a real OS). I just ordered a Vostro 1000 notebook for the Mrs. $399 SHIPPED w/ dual core AMD, 1GB Mem, 120 GB HD, DVD DL writer. I was waiting for the Medison (thought it was a scam looking more to be) or the Asus (but those jokers jacked the price to the price of a real notebook) .
Had an option of XP or Vista at oder this time (so many people had railed against OEM's that Vista sucked that OEM's started offering the option) ....this time picked XP. If you want desktop search and don't like Google Desktop, give Windows Desktop Search a spin (as much as I hate to admit it, it's pretty good).
M$FT better have something a little more substantial than a way scaled back offering of their next BIG OS offering, or the Lemmings might wake up.
IF YOU MUST use Windoze. Go with XP for now.
JoeyR, have you considered OpenOffice?
Oh yeah and that reminds me on few more tips if you're going to use Windoze.
1. Never buy Office or any office suite (unless you're some hopped up VBA jockey or have macro's out the wazoo in Excel)
2. Never buy ANTI-Virus
www.grisoft.com (look for the free version, if you can't find it ping me)
3. NEVER use I.E. (they may have gotten better with their propensity to get all malwared up, but I've had re-image more than a few friends boxes due to this crap) go with FIREFOX. It am much better.
4. ALWAY install Ad-Aware (just in case someone else may consider using IE on your machine)
5. Consider virtualization if you're going to be doing tons O' browsing and to potentially unsafe places.
6. Remember to Defrag your disk from time to time.
I WOULD STRONGLY recommend people investigate Ubuntu. It'll do most of what you want out of the box, and it'll let you try before you commit installs by allowing you run it live (off the CD loaded into memory).
Good luck