My cousin called yesteray, wanting me to buy a laptop for her. I first thought of Toshibas, cuz they have a rep as being durable.

I selected this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114466

cuz it comes with XP and cous' is no techie.

Slipstreaming those drivers is possible.  There are lots of how to's on the web.  Google should be able to dig them up for you pretty easy.  Although, if you have a Ghost image of the complete OS, including drivers, then slipstreaming isn't really necessary...

The only drawback to downgrading a new PC to XP that I see, is that you're installing an 8 year old OS.  All new hardware and software is being created for Vista, not XP. 

With a minimum of effort, I can make Vista look and act a lot more like XP and I do it for every new Vista PC that I install for my customers.

Then if they buy new software or hardware made expressly for Vista, they won't have any compatibility problems.

For the home PC user, there are 22 services that can be safely shut down, either completely disabled, or put into "Manual" mode.  In either case this takes a huge workload off of the CPU and ram and DOES improve Vista's performance.  There are also a few registry tweaks that can also positively impact performance.

I have no love affair with Vista, but I figure it's here, so why not make the best of it.  I had to do the same thing eight years ago when XP started showing up on my customer's desks.  I beat on XP like a Missouri mule till I got it to do what I wanted it to do.

Good Luck with your little Toshiba.....that's my favorite brand of store-bought laptops. 
For the user with lots of $'s to spend, Panasonic and SagerNotebook are very interesting. 

Cheers Mate!
The Shadow