Interesting dilemma...
Well, I’ve been working off of a second drive for the last couple of weeks with Windows Vista/Office 2007/IE7 loaded on it. Same laptop, just a different hard drive. I just put my Windows XP SP2/Office 2003/IE 6 drive back in to check to see if I had moved all of my data over.
My laptop seems to run much faster, and much better, all of the apps, with the older versions of the Microsoft software. Office 2003 and IE6 seem to run much faster on my laptop. I use Quicken 2007 and the R4 release of Quicken 2007 seems to have broke the program on Vista. I had to uninstall, and reinstall the out-of-the-box version to get it to work, so even Quicken appears to be running much better on XP. My printer, scanner, fax machine also work with my XP drive, but there are no drivers yet for my Windows Vista drive. So while I couldn’t print or scan (I was copying data to a USB drive and using another computer for scanning/printing), I was getting used to some of the new features in Vista and thought this was the direction I needed. I also couldn’t attach my digital camera, or my digital camcorder because the drivers have not yet been updated. I was taking several additional steps to do the same functions to edit the pictures or video we’d taken.
I’m not sure now after a couple of hours of consistent use back on my XP drive that I’ll put my Vista drive back in. I seem to be enjoying having full functionality of my laptop back, rather than only having pieces that work while I wait for company’s like Canon to get their act together.