Forced to use XP again

A couple of weeks ago, my old laptop's motherboard gave up the ghost, so after much price and feature shopping, I got a new Toshiba Satellite A100 laptop for work.

In general, I love this box.  It's pretty fast, has a good modern processor, a decent video card (NVidia Go 7300), 1G RAM, and more extras than I would expect for a value laptop (it cost under $1000).  This thing's got Bluetooth, a fingerprint reader, a SD flash reader, IR, and other stuff - way more than I'd expect for a low end laptop.

I have only two major complaints about it.  The first is that the monitor, while a 15 inch widescreen monitor, can only do 1280x800 (my old laptop could do 1280x1024 and I miss that).

The other major complaint is that I can't run Vista on it.  Toshiba hasn't yet released the display drivers for the video card, so I have the choice of running XP in 1280x800 or Vista in 1024x768 VGA mode.  And I'm addicted to the resolution.

I actually tried Vista for a while, but it was too painful - everything worked (even the silly fingerprint reader had drivers on Windows Update), but not having the screen working just got on my nerves.

What's interesting is that after using Vista exclusively at work for 6 months and almost exclusively for over a month (I have one machine at home I use that doesn't have Vista on it), I've decided that the XP UI is just broken.  I've got totally used to the Vista UX and hate not having it.  I miss being able to type into the pearl, I actually miss breadcrumbs (which is wierd, because I hated them when I first encountered them).

I can't wait until Toshiba finally gets the drivers for my machine finished, XP feels so dated.