Vista? Hello or goodbye?

[Dave S]

Hey Bar,

So I got my brand-new-second-hand Lenovo T61 - seems like a great
machine so far.

This one came fully tricked out (4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, webcam etc.) but
has Win Vista Business 32bit installed.

I've been playing with it a bit, and to be honest, I don't actually
hate the user experience so far.  But there are a few small annoyances
which I'm trying to figure out a solution to.

Essentially, I want to repartition the hard drive so I can dual boot
with Linux Mint Debian Edition.  I've managed this OK-ish so far, in
that using various tools and by turning lots of things like Hibernate
and Restore Points off, I've been able to squish the Vista partition
down to "only" 330GB - despite the fact that only 20GB of it is
actually containing any data.

This isn't really good enough for me! I always keep my system and my
data files separate, and with this much hard drive space partitioned
(seemingly irrevocably) to Vista because of unmovable system files
like (the empty) $Badclus which is sitting there bang in the middle of
the drive like a stupid unmovable blob, I'm finding that I'm seriously
considering wiping Vista off here and putting XP Pro on instead for
music making, if only so I can set up a sane (safer) hard drive
partition scheme.

(Incidentally, I was unable to find out a clear answer on this: Does
the presence of an empty $Badclus file give any cause for concern? Or
is it on every Vista partition, regardless of whether there are any
bad clusters?)

So, the question is: at this point in 2011, have I got anything to
lose from downgrading to XP? Especially considering that music making
is just about the only thing I use Windows for, and that XP handles my
needs just fine?

I don't have any Vista re-install DVD, and I'm not quite sure if I can
make the Lenovo recovery disks either (haven't yet found where to do
this from despite checking various online tutorials). I'm unlikely to
shell out for Win 7, so if I do get rid of Vista, it may well be
fairly final.

It's just that XP to me is a far more known quantity (with partitions
that I can resize in GParted for a start!), and still does everything
I need from Windows land as far as I can tell.

So, Vista: nuke it or keep it?

Thanks for your thoughts!

~Dave