Upgrading from Vista to XP

I've had enough. I like the pretty and the candy as much as the next guy, but Vista has run its course for me. Since I assembled my new PC in the summer I've been limping along with Vista Ultimate waiting (and hoping) that SP1 would help improve the situation. I'm running an AMD64 X2 4000+ dual core with 4GB of RAM, and the machine seems slower than before I upgraded the hardware when I was running XP.

My wife's machine (3600+ 2GB) running Vista would crash frequently without cause or being able to find a solution. She begged me to put XP back on which I did and she's as happy as can be. I thought I'd wait it out just a little longer, so I was very happy to see the SP RC show up in my Windows Update. I grabbed it right away and waited for it to install.

I was rewarded with 4 system crashes the first night I put it on. I might add that system stability was not an issue prior to this. So I uninstalled the SP RC and am left now with the task of upgrading to XP - or spending more time in my other installed OS (Ubuntu 7.10) which is becoming more and more attractive all the time.

Maybe XP SP3 will finally give me the performance I was hoping for from Vista - http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20071126/tc_nf/56872

What happened to the great innovative company that changed the face of computing? I guess no one stays on top forever. R.I.P. Microsoft.