Many computers with XP have been advertised as "Vista ready." My daughter's dual core Dell, purchased last summer, had that claim. I upgraded her to XP Pro. Whatever you do, get the Pro version of the software, it saves you a lot of grief. If you order a computer you will find the upgrade is most affordable, typically about $75. To buy the box in a store and upgrade yourself will cost more.

Joe, why are you buying a new computer because this one is "full?" Buy an external drive. I've seen the things dirt cheap lately. 300, 400 gig for a couple of hundred or LESS. Move some of that data over to a new drive and keep using your computer. Shop around for a good hard drive, and they don't like to be jostled and moved a lot, so find a place where you're going to put it and leave it there. You can also get great big internal drives, so you could copy your existing drive onto an external drive (operating system and all--use Ghost) then replace the hard drive and rewrite everything back onto it. Or buy a new one and add it--there is usually space for at least one more hard drive inside the case. Make the new one a slave to the old one, or copy as described above and make the old one the slave. There are any number of ways to avoid the expense of a new computer.

While you're at it, get yourself a DVD/CD burner and backup some of that data on a double density DVD. It isn't something you can pop into a player, it's simply an extra form of backup. And shop around for the speed and types of tiles the burner will process. I had to replace a dead DVD writer a few months ago and discovered that there is a new sort of file (can't remember what it's called, but I was comparing features) that the new burners can process. My system is an HP and I shopped around--HP offered the exact drive I lost, but the stores didn't carry it any more because it is being discontinued. And the prices were such that I could buy the newer drive at CompUSA for the same price as HP was offering me the discontinued drive.

My two-cents worth.

SRS