I need a cheap laptop for taking around and running some windows only programs.  One laptop I am looking at is a used Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz 2 GB Ram.  Its available with either XP Pro or Vista Business.

Which of the two have been more reliable for you?  How about your favorite tools, do they work better on either OS?  I don't use Windows much, but I'm familiar with XP.

Vista is more compatible with newer apps, but I haven't tried to run much on XP lately. You'll have better luck moving forward.

XP was probably more stable, Vista pretty close if not the same now.

XP is more vulnerable to attacks and less secure overall.

I would definitely go with Vista, I see no benefit in XP.

>Personally I would install Win7

Agreed. Vista is a POS.

Win7 wasn't an option in the OP.

>Vista is a POS.

I take it's been a while since you've used Vista?

Yeah, I was on Vista up until Win7 had been around a while. Remember it as being a unstable resource hawker that had problems all the time.

>Win7 wasn't an option in the OP.

Good point. XP then

I have xp, vista, & w7.  I personally use xp for development but from what little I've done with w7, it is useable. OTOH, I am occasionally forced to tweak vista on one of Louise's laptops or the media center.  To quote NFFC, I'd rather have a sharp needle in the eye than have to work using vista.

I did no read the other posts. But I would rather eat my own shite than use vista. Simple an awful steaming pile of cack.

I was using vista prior to Windows 7 (now on Linux of course)

I had no real problems with Vista - still can't understand all the flack it keeps getting.

Windows 7 is better, but if that isn't an option, Vista was fine for me. Obviously, needs more memory than XP to run well, but these days even base level machines shouldn't have a problem.

My main workstation runs Vista Business and I've not had many complaints over the past 4.5 years. It's a perfectly fine OS if you have the hardware to support it. I prefer it to XP myself, but I'll still use XP or 7 on underpowered machines like laptops and netbooks.

Given the hardware specs above I'd say you should go with XP. Vista has much higher hardware requirements. That's why a lot of people thought it was crap. It didn't operate well on underpowered hardware. I've got dual Xeon processors and 12GB RAM on my workstation. I don't think that Core Duo processor and 2GB of RAM will be up to the challenge.

The other alternative is to run Windows 7. It would work fine on a laptop with those specs. You would probably just have to turn off a lot of the Aero graphics, but otherwise it should work fine.

Yeah, I've not understood the complaints on Vista either, though I did wait on SP1 (or2?) before running it. I heard a lot of problems with the first release but supposedly worked all that out by the time I loaded it 2 1/2 years ago. I guess we'll have to chalk it up to operator error. ;-)

I also prefer Win7, but for $100 less without upgrading, Vista has been fine.

My understanding was 1gb was minimum for Vista, with 2gb and you're good. (I run 6gb so have no idea firsthand.)

As far as Aero, that's more dependent on the graphics chip/memory I believe.

The whole problem with the stated minimum specs for Vista was that they said all you needed was a 1 GHz processor and 1 GB RAM to run it. I found it difficult to run on machines with the minimum. I guess littleman does have double the MS recommended minimum though... 

Vista with the later updates is fine.  It might have been bad at the start, but I use it every day and it works without issue.

I also use XP and Win7 daily without any problems.

Win7 is just better when it comes to getting work done, but in your situation I'd go with Vista.

Another vote to avoid Vista for me.  Too slow, too many annoyances.  We actually paid to "downgrade" some machines here in order to avoid it.  win7 isn't bad - it's like vista with most of the crap fixed.

We have 12 machines here at the moment.  1 runs vista.  I haven't seen one person choose to use that machine in the last 3 months.  Even the xubuntu box gets more love.

Thanks for all the perspective.  Basically I've been avoiding windows since about 1999, so I really appreciate the insight.  Reading here and in other places it is clear that the first release of Vista was crap, but a lot of people say that it got better after SP2.

If it were up to just dealing with an OS I'd pick XP, but as I'm buying this PC specifically to use with Windows only programs it would make sense to use the OS that is most current.  That said, I still see a lot of programs compatible with XP.