Hi Joe,
There were several reasons to put XP on these machines:
1) The staff who are going to use them specifically wanted small, XP machines. They’d used Vista, and don’t like it.
2) We don’t support Vista on our network, and won’t until *all* our machines are capable of running it adequately. Past experience with mixed 2000/XP, 98/ME and ME/2000 networks have shown me that having more than one OS on the network causes support hell.
3) A lot of our software (mainly educational stuff) simply won’t run on Vista.
4) Our school management system is not supported if we run it on something other than XP or OS X, and the automatic updates don’t work if you use Vista.
5) The Freevents runs *much* quicker, and cooler (although it’s still pretty warm!), than it does with Vista. It boots in around 20 seconds, instead of over a minute.