First, this laptop is fairly decent. HP dv9700 w/ 4GB of dual channel RAM, core duo 2.5Ghz, dual 120GB HD's (no RAID though), 17" w/ HDMI, Blu-ray player, Nvidia 8800 512MB, blah blah... Not top of the line, but it should be enough to handle Vista. Overall Vista isn't bad, when it works. But certain apps will just hang for apparently no reason and when I try to kill them through Task Manager they won't go away and start messing up everything else. Also, I have a Windows Home Server box set up and my XP computer gives me no problems. Vista on the other hand will loose connection to the server after a while and I have to reboot the laptop to fix it. Vista just doesn't seem to play well with XP and Windows Server...
Anyways, thanks for the info. I'll follow the links and give it a try. Also, I've heard about VMWare from my friend, I may go that route until I get a good OS setup I like. I have multiple backups of the laptop on my server so I'm not really afraid to go screwing around. I just don't want to waste too much time with it.