When my Toshiba Qosmio died, I bought a new Sony machine from the local shop here in Poland, it had Windows Vista home premium edition preinstalled on it. Everything that I ever new about XP was upside down, back to front with this new OS. So I installed another product where now I can ran multiple machines on the same machine, I now have Vista installed on the primary and XP installed on my virtual machine, which works great, easy to backup and network.
Here is the link to their website.
http://www.vmware.com/products/ws/
Regards
Simon