Why...
...did it take you so long?
A friend of mine's boyfriend bought a brand new top of the range HP laptop, which came with Vista. He liked the flashy eye-candy on Vista, so declinded his girlfriend's offer to "down"grade it. Her response? "Within a week you'll change your mind, let me know when you're done playing".
A week later, he had taken to swearing at his laptop all day long while waiting for it to do the simplest opperation, and decided to get Gem to downgrade it. A couple of hours later, he was given it back, and his first comment was:
"I thought you were putting XP on it"
That's right, it was XP but looked exactly like Vista, with all the eye-candy. She had installed Vista Inspirat. Everything was much faster, but it looked (almost) exactly the same.
Unfortunately it has been back to HP twice so far, and each time (in spite of her pleading for them not to reinstall vista) it took another couple of hours to reinstall XP and all his apps. Worth it to get a top-end laptop to stop running like a P90 with 8Mb RAM though....