Vista Twista Now that XP is unsupported, what do you do? 2008: Year of decisions (other than voting): Try Vista? Hang on to XP as long as you can? OSX, Linux?  Choices and more choices. My venerable Sony VAIO with XP died during a horrific lightning strike last summer, so the question as to whether it had enough power to support a Vista upgrade became a moot point. My new PC came loaded with Vista and a 400 GB hard drive. This was good, as I am with Vista while teaching my digital photography classes. I need to know how it works. Those who have tried Vista seem to love it or take it off immediately. I miss the familiarity of XP and am puzzled by unexplained crashes and a LOT of "old" software that wont work on Vista. The service pack seems to have helped. But last night Vista announced that the Media Manager had detected a new Xbox (gaming system) had been added to my home network.  I don't own an Xbox. Since I have a LOT of drive space, I gambled a few month back and made a dual-boot system with Ubuntu (Linux) as another option.   I find myself using Ubuntu more each week. It come with a free Windows emulator  (WINE) that runs many of my old favorites. And the amount of free software that come with Ubuntu is amazing.  Want to try it? Download the CD "ISO image" from http://www.ubuntu.com/  or order the CD. Like many other distributions (variations) of Linux, this "distro" can also be used as a live CD. That means you can run it right from the CD and install nothing. It's a good way to try it. Bless all these creative people and support them if you can! Those of you who live in metro areas with big chain bookstores may also find British computer magazines with DVDs included that have live Linux distros ready to boot off a single disk. At around $16.95 a copy, they are a good way to get an overview of Linux without spending hours downloading.