Sky...I use XP on my desktop computer and Vista is on my laptop. I wasn't real excited about Vista...always issues with a new OS. But, it's worked pretty well so far.
As far as anything for microsoft word/excel etc. there is a free program you can download that is called OpenOffice. It's an awesome program and will open all microsoft files from word to excel to access etc. You can download it from
http://www.openoffice.org/ I think you will like it, it's pretty cool. Also, anything you compose in OpenOffice will be read by microsoft word, etc.

Pretty cool eh?
Good luck!

sabby