Hello drone,

Some brands and depending on type, supply a XP recovery CD. It's not always obvious which one does, so it helps to ask the sales and insist it's important to you.

I purchased a notebook lately, it's for work. Vista is installed on it by default, but it has XP recovery CD's. Note: it has XP recovery CD's, not Vista ones. A customer can create those himself using the recovery partition on the HD.

I already had a little experience with Vista and I wasn't delighted. By choosing a notebook I already was pretty sure that I wanted XP, but I gave Vista a try. It's a test of patience and failing to run software and I installed XP now.

I would advice to go for 32 bit XP Pro, it's not a MI since many people don't want Vista. I believe vendors are (somewhat) forced to install Vista and recommend it (publically). But they also know what customers want.