One word, TRIAL. Do the vista trial and see how it works out. At least you will have some knowledge of how your gear is going to pan out drivers wise. Obviously its a spec issue as well, people need to know what video card your using and so forth for these types of things. But mileage varies intensely on these things. Not a lot of hardware is needed to spec out, but video (keyclone pip?), separated ./wow hard drive, castrating vista's services (likely take longer than any other step)