One last note regarding file sharing on Vista computers. Vista is very heavy into security, consequently, the only folders you can share (that can be seen and copied/moved/etc) on your Vista laptop must be placed in the "public documents" folder.
So if your trying to pull files out of the laptop (Vista) using the PC (XP), your PC is only going to "see" the folder called Public Documents. Going the other way, the Vista computer will see the entire root directory of XP as long as you have enabled file sharing (on the XP computer)
You can by-pass the Vista security (so you can share the root directory) by editing the system registry in Vista, but it is NOT a simple edit, and I don't recommend it. (It can be found by google - "Vista share root directory")
We just found this out at last month at work, as I built 4 - Vista64 systems, and discovered you could not share the root directory (like you can on previous versions of Windows). It was a royal pain, as I thought I had done something wrong, then discovered it was part of Vista's layered security. Now that we're used to it, it's no big deal.
P.S. I give 2 thumbs up to Vista 64 (Ultimate). It's smoking fast, no driver problems, and was the easiest most un-complicated install of ANY Windows I've ever had. (I've been building computers for my business for about 10 years) One other FANTASTIC thing about Vista... it notes any files that have been updated during the day, and creates shadow copies of those files during shut down. So if at noon the next day, you lose all of a file you were working on, you can go to "file" "restore previous version" and it will restore it to the previous shutdown. (I had a programmer lose 4 days of work - we found the restore previous function, and he only ended up losing 4 hours of work... that itself paid for all 4 copies of Vista!)
