If you are going to order a Dell, you are going to have to order it online I think, (I dont know of anywhere that carries a lot of Dell computers as far as retail stores are concerned), but anyway, if you order it online, you can customize all kinds of options, including the operating system that you want. I would reccomend getting XP on it and then buying a Windows Vista upgrade and dual booting that if you want to. The problem is that if you buy it with Vista, and then want to go back to XP, it is very difficult to do.