I planned on doing the same thing. I really loved the looks of the macbook air so I went out and picked one up when the good old student loan checks came in. I was going to get an air and install XP on it, until I thought to my self "hmm, maybe there is something to all this hype" and tried getting used to the mac OS, it was really hard and frustrating at first, because I was trying to find something for 10 minutes than I could find in 1.5 seconds in XP. But after that initial switching shock I think you will warm up to OSX, not only warm up, you will probably never use windows again. I had to use my friends Vista laptop to do an Access project for a college course, and it was terrible. I found my self going to the wrong side of the menu bar to minimize/close a program. It felt like using a mac OS did for the first time after using windows for 10+ years. Enjoy your mac, at the very least give osx a shot, (I did about a week ago, and i'd never go back once you get used to it in a few days of playing around) Install windows Xp using bootcamp to use some of your microsoft essential programs, LIKE ACCESS. And thats about all i've ran into so far that I can't get for a mac. I'm trying to use bootcamp to install windows on a 6gb partition but it keeps erroring out and going nuts (that is the first thing thats went wrong with the mac, installing a MS product...)