Though I would try Vista on my laptop, nothing is ever simple

NEW hard disk and some more RAM (US prices are Sooo reasonable)

install was great, than came the fun
Sky Anytime requires admin rights to run (something which Vista does not give away lightly), i then had to phone sky to tell them i had rebuilt my PC, as te ANYTIME software thought it was a different machine, the Sky Anytime helpdesk was surprisingly effecient at sorting that out !

Then there was device drivers, the modem, Card reader and web cam do not seem to come with bundled drivers, Compaq support site says they wont support Vista on ths laptop, but then they dont do 64 bit drivers for XP for it either (what is the fucking point is selling a 64 bit laptop without 64 bit OS and Drivers)
so “google is my friend” and discovered a few other laptops with the SAME crad reader chip set, and managed to down load a driver from herehttp://www.sagernotebook.com/pages/notebooks/download.cfm?ProductType=5750

SORTED…

not going to bother with the modem, have not used one in years !

the WEBCAM however is a different story