>I had no problem installing Vista as a dual boot on my XP machine. It did make Vista the primary boot OS, but the process was fairly smooth.

That's probably because you have actually installed it, from a DVD. No such luxury with HP's laptops... you get it preinstalled with about a gigabyte of HP's own crapware (mostly ads for whatever they think they can sell you), plus a racket (aka "selling protection") from Symantec etc etc. You can't even pick what to install or not, it restores from a 8G partition and whipes the rest of the disk to restore it to factory conditions. I've done that once... never again. It takes a whole day.