For home users you should only consider Vista Home Premium. Why? Vista home basic is even more stripped down than XP Home. There’s an interesting way to avoid paying so much money to Microsoft for Vista…install the upgrade version on a blank hard drive without any other versions of windows present. . Impossible? nopers. Here’s how you do it:
1. Boot with the Windows Vista Upgrade DVD.
2. Click “Install Now.” NOTE: during the install delete all of your partitions and then reformat the drive after recreating the partition.
3. Do not enter a Product Key When prompted.
4. When prompted, select the Vista product edition that you do have.
6. Install Vista normally.
7. Once the install is complete, restart the DVD-based Setup from within Windows Vista. Perform an in-place upgrade.
8. Enter your Product Key when prompted.
I am going to add one more thing to this…format your drive before trying this. I have a feeling Vista will search the hard disk for a previous installation and if it finds it it might invalidate that key forever since upgrading xp to vista invalidates that xp license forever.