here u go christina... vista ebooks ...dont know much about laptops but there is a program that is supposed to double ur battery life but I can't remember what its called at the moment ...I will find it tho and send it to you...I have used vista without all the bells and whistles and it will run alot better without them...the biggest ram hog of vista is the areo glass theme...and the side bar...I think u should look at these ebooks on vista and play with the OS alot...btw I ran vista on an old hp 667 cpu with 256 megs of ram and it ran pretty good...a bit slow at times but not bad...