I'd say don't go Vista, it's a terrible system, too big, slow and needs a LOT of patches and tweaking to make it work well, and win7 is just about here. I have installed and used Vista on 4-5 machines and while some work acceptably, some are terribly slow and clumsy, and all are annoying to use in real life.

Instead, get Win7 freely downloadable evaluation version, it's good for 120 days and then change to a full one when it's available. It's way better.

I myself run Xp Pro on my main machine (sometimes boot to Linux side but very very rarely) as well as on my main laptop; we have another laptop w/Xp home as well, a Linux (Ubuntu) desktop box and I also just had a Vista laptop for a year, onto which I also put Win7 beta on and used that for a good while. Still, good riddance in favour of the Xp one again.

I'm changing to Win7 on my main desktop around Xmas I think, this time probably taking the 64bit version too, so I can use more than 2 or 3 gigs of mem.

At work they have had macs for years, also in the studio, but they're being phased out as nobody likes them, they're hard to use if you're used to windows boxes with all the options etc, and they are expensive to maintain plus there's not enough software support. (To me too they seem like crippled and limited OS's and they're damned slow and inefficient for the price - sorry maccies, but it's how I feel.) If you want a basic, safe system for surfing and writing etc. Ubuntulinux is great. Works really really smoothly even on the old desktop which is (I think a 2.6GHz P4 with very baseline specs, and old office computer not any gaming platform). I'd love Ubuntu if only it could offer me at least most of what I need to do, but so far only Windows offers all I need.

At work we run most of the stuff over the network from a mainframe, using Xp Pro terminals or win2003 server terminals within Xp; I logon to it from home too using Cisco remote terminal etc.