[newbe]

good day and sorry for this long post as I will try to be as clear as possible. I recently bought a used gateway computer GM5626, Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2180 Processor # 3GB PC2-5300 DDR2 Memory # 500GB 7200rpm SATA Hard Drive # 18x...

good day and sorry for this long post as I will try to be as clear as possible.

I recently bought a used gateway computer GM5626, Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2180 Processor
# 3GB PC2-5300 DDR2 Memory
# 500GB 7200rpm SATA Hard Drive
# 18x DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Burner w/ LabelFlash Technology
# 15-in-1 Media Card Reader
# 256MB NVidia GeForce 8500GT PCI-Express X16 Graphics
# 7.1 Channel High Definition Audio
# v.92 56Kbps Modem, 10/100 Ethernet
# Six USB 2.0, One Firewire, Nine audio jacks, One Parallel, One ******
# Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1


but i've been having some irritating issues. i bought the computer online from a guy who said he was simply upgrading to a more power computer, well this one seemed like a great upgrade for myself. Anyways my old computer came with vista but i downgraded because many programs weren't compatible. When I downgraded back to xp, my soundcard and lightscribe didn't work and there were no xp drivers for those devices. I really want to downgrade this system back to xp but finding all these drivers seems like a big hassle.

So here's the problems i'm having with Vista or maybe it's this darn computer...... web pages freeze. it's happened a few times when i try to select some text or a picture to copy, the page freezes and it says "not responding".... also sometimes when i have a few web pages and programs running, i try to switch browers or programs and the taskbar goes blank, i run the mouse over different icons and they disappear, i try to press a browser but it does nothing, i try to minimize or maximize a browser and it does nothing.........in task manager it says my computer usage is only 40%, the old owner wiped the system clean before he sold it to me, so everything was suppose to be the factory setting when i bought it. also i woke up the last couple of mornings and the computer had restarted while i was sleep. There's an error message about the sudden restart, i click it and says these things are probably responsible.

"C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini020909-01.dmp
C:\WINDOWS\Temp\WER-57361-0.sysdata.xml
C:\WINDOWS\Temp\WER117D.tmp.version.txt"

All these different problems are becoming a headache........I've ran avg free and no trojans were detected.........can someone please help, this is irritating me, tooooo many problems. Should I go back to xp, if i go back to xp i guess i'll get better performance from this 3gb of ram? the most i ever had was 896mb so i was real excited about the 3gb of ram, but i'm worried this video card, audio card, motherboard, network, etc... may not work with xp, if i do xp should i use sp3, i currently only have the sp1 for xp. I know windows 7 is beta but is it true all programs that are xp compatible are compatible with 7? would that be a better option? or are these problems i'm having with vista minor and worth the fix? thanks and sorry for all the questions.