>Come to that do I need ultimate or should I just buy a copy of vista business and replace whats on the laptop.

There still aren't a lot of hardware drivers for Vista, and with the odd graphic "cards" and such in a laptop, you might want to get one with Vista pre-installed. Also, we bought a modest LG laptop, dual core, with 1 gig RAM, but Vista runs really fast on it. So I think the hardware mfrs spend a bit of time tweaking the laptops to run Vista faster.