>>I have had a Dell Precision M6300 with 17" screen, 2.2GHz, 2.0 GB, 100GB hard drive, and running Vista Business since March. I like it alot. It is faster than my old one that was comparable and ran XP when using common tools such as Source Safe and such and has not crashed once. I use VFP 9, Sql Express, VS 2008, and the standard office suite on it.
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>>I have no complaints once I turned the UAC off.
>
>I've been using a Dell Inspiron 9400 (also known as E1705) with 2GIG, 17" screen, and loaded with all options you could get with it for 2 years.
>
>Works like a champ. Regrettably I'm using 32 bit Vista Ultimate, but it does not crash and has been pretty much solid as a rock.
>
>I recommend Dell laptops highly.

My experience with Vista Ultimate has been the same. For all the jokes about it, it has worked fine for me.

Well, until about an hour ago, and I am not ready to call this a Vista problem yet. Today's mail brought the release version of SQL Server 2008 so I ran the install. It went through a few dozen setup screens which gathered all kinds of information about what components I wanted to install, what user security accounts to use, install locations, etc. before blithely informing me that VS SP1 had to be installed first. OK, I can take a joke, better late than never. As luck would have it that service pack was in the same mailing. Out with the SQL Server disc, in with the VS service pack. It doesn't autorun into a setup program as I would expect but I find the EXE and run it. Crash. The only information I am given is that an unexpected error occurred during installation. Gosh, thanks. I didn't expect it to crash, either, buffalo breath. Going to reboot and see what happens....