imo vista is the worst os since nt. my 5 yr old has a system i upgraded to 256mb ram running nt. it runs like a charm. i have and xps m1530... with bells and whistles 4gb ram, nvidia geforce, yadda yadda. i have to keep an extra hard drive with an os on it to play my games. they work like a charm at first and a month later... crash. altogether i'm running xp pro and home, nt, vista and linux disks from time to time and i have to say vista is trash like 98. it took me months to get everything working on my system. i mean i built all my friends pc's for crying out loud... why don't simple manipulations work the first time? i still have to open, close, wait for it, wait for it, open my control panel every time i need to use it. there's no excuse for that with my hardware... and i got rid of all the dell bloatware.
i don't blame you guys for wanting to upgrade!
oh, forgot to mention... i NEVER would have willingly switched to vista... or bought a vista system for that matter. this was my replacement for my cozy xp system. it crashed and dell gave me this vista trash system... arrrrrrrrgggggghhhh. needless to say i don't recommend dell anymore!
EDIT: also you can turn off that annoying user account control and then turn off the warnings too. it's your call though. mine are turned off. i feel i gave it permission to do it what i told it when i DOUBLE clicked.