Just a thought, but why not get windows XP pro. I have a presario Compaq 12XL3, 160 MB ram 6 GIG hdd, 566MHZ runs XP pro smoothly. I had a preinstalled ME OS, deleted that crap, installed XP pro and it works great. Compaq installs a bunch of crap on your PC, so what i did was went to their site, downloaded all the drivers from their softpaq for my notebook, installed XP pro, then used the drivers from the softpaq and overwrote them onto my clean XP pro installation. Everything works great, the touchpad, volume control, and easy access keys...
That is what I would do if I were you.

BB