What model of HP laptop are you looking at. HP is pretty good about keeping a good list of drivers, and I saw both the XP and Vista drivers for my new dv9000 series laptop on their site. I'm perfectly happy with Vista on my laptop. I figured I would dual-boot Vista and XP, but everything seemed to work in Vista so I had no reason to install XP (though I do have 40GB unpartitioned just in case I decide to install it). I would NOT recommend deleting Vista altogether, I would dual-boot, that way you can have the advantages of both OS'es.