[Tristan Lall]

I'm surprised that nobody's asked: what's the issue you're experiencing with Vista? Unsurprisingly, killing the OS and reinstalling is a pretty crude and wasteful way of keeping your computer happy, in a lot of cases.

You didn't get stuck with one of the "Windows Vista Capable" systems, which lack sufficient RAM and video processing power to run the Aero theme, right?

If not that, I'd bet it's the UAC prompts that are annoying you. (Those are the ones that want you to confirm every action that would normally require administrative privileges.) You can turn those off; search the internet for using gpedit.msc for turning aspects of UAC off. (And there's really no reason to kill UAC completely, but if you understand the implications behind doing that, tutorials are readily available as well.) The whole UAC thing is really the culmination of a lack of understanding on the part of users, and some poor communications by Microsoft. Basically, it exists because formerly (on the pre-version-6.0, NT-based versions of Windows like 2003, XP, 2000 and NT 4) you had to run as an administrator to get much of anything done conveniently. Most people weren't up to the task of managing that excess power all of the time, and were therefore giving themselves a lot of grief by letting various malware into their computers. UAC is, in short, a way of isolating that power. Now, to get actual administrative rights, you need to click through the special UAC prompt; prior to that, you run as a locked-down user. So, basically, it really is a feature, not a bug, and if you don't like it, you can just shut it off.

By the way, it looks like Eugene is describing the System Restore service, in combination with Windows Recovery. It doesn't necessarily use an alternate partition; it will work just fine on the system partition alone. There's a separate file backup utility (not NTBackup like in 2000, XP, etc.), but it's not a replacement for Acronis, and it only allows full backups, rather than letting you customize. (The justification for this was that NTBackup was overkill for the casual user, which while potentially true, is a real pain for those of us who used NTBackup.)

Also, you know there's a service pack for Vista at the release candidate stage, right? You can download SP1 RC1 and install it, if you're interested. It won't be perfect, but then again, Microsoft has provided the functionality to uninstall the release candidate and install the final version when it comes along. If you're experiencing actual bugs, rather than just disliking the features (a few of which are definitely bad in their own right), this is the way to go.

Finally, if you're interested in following Microsoft's rules for licencing, you'll have to get a separate licence for XP. (Vista Business and Vista Ultimate allow downgrades to XP Professional when sold with OEM licences, but no other versions of Vista do.) So, do you have access to a spare licence of XP or have money to waste? Otherwise, unauthorized copies are your only option....