Vista Retreat? XP to live longer?

I bought a cheap laptop at Best Buy that came with Vista. I pity people who buy a Vista laptop with 256mb of RAM. I immediately went out, found drivers and installed XP. It was very hard to find all the drivers (Toshiba A135-7404) and I know that even some savvy IT people would have trouble finding the drivers. Toshiba wanted to keep the laptops Vista only, but it was PAINFUL!

I bought the laptop to do Graphic Design work and web/email while I was living in hotels. The laptop's specs were plenty to run Photoshop and Flash, but Vista was too big to let them run without crashing. Even the SATA drive and Readyboost running was help, I had to buy RAM. But I would not pay Best Buy RAM prices and shipping to the hotel was an issue - since I didn't know where I'd be one week to the next.

Downgrade was the only option. Maybe someday I will add the necessary 2gb of RAM and put Vista back on it, but I bet I buy a new laptop long before then. Maybe I will move to Ubuntu on it before that is necessary. Photoshop and Flash are not happy under WINE yet. I love GIMP, but the lack of Flash is a problem.

So now that I have downgraded, I knew Microsoft could kill off XP at any point. The drop dead date is coming up, and then it gets another delay. Why? Ultra light laptops can't run Vista and Microsoft does not want any doors for Linux in the mainstream. So, not because they know their product is bloated and sloppy, but because it is so bloated and sloppy that it hurts their market penetration.

The "mission creep" of Vista has the better of them. They never saw a feature they didn't like and threw them all in. With no way to disable these options or de-bloat the operating system they were not prepared for the greener, lower power devices of the future. A fundamental flaw in Windows since NT has them by the short hairs almost 15 years later.