Should I use Vegas or Movie Studio on Vista or/and XP?
 

First off, I would like to thank the contributers of this site for some great starter info on the world of HDV.

A few weeks back I purchased a HV10. I took it on a vacation to Bermuda and shot some great footage. I had previously worked with SD capture and editing with various editors. When I came home, I tried to do some Vegas 7.0 editing on my HTPC - an older (1.5 yrs) amd xp w/ 1 gig RAM & 200 gb hd space. HDV was brutal!

So, with only a couple of days before a 2 month deployment to India, I decided that I needed to purchase a new laptop to do some editing/rendering work while overseas.

I purchased an HP Pavillion dr9260nr. It has a Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.0 GHz), 2 gig ram, 2x 100 gig harddrives (only 5400rpm) a NVidia geforce go 7600 w/ 256 mb dedicated, a 500 GB external (7200 rpm).. wait for it...VISTA ultimate preinstalled (boo!)

My question to you folks is:

Am I better off (from a editing/rendering of travel/personal video standpoint) to go with Movie Studio 8.0 (vista ready) OR go thru the exercise of setting this machine up with dual boot of both Vista and XP and install Vegas pro 7.0 on the XP HD?

Also if I go with MS 8.0 (which does not include Cineform) should i just use gearshift?

I am new to the HDV world and requirments, but have been trying my hardest to make sense of this all.

PS- I plan on building a new XP based quad core when I get home for my editing station...

with all the opinions on this site, no one can offer me suggestions? :)

GearShift does not work in Movie Studio. None of the scripting applications do.
As to the rest of it, I have no opinion. I personally won't use Vista and don't understand the excitement about the OS. It has been nothing short of a pain on our existing test systems.