Took the plunge and bought a laptop for use in the observatory.  I’m dealing with Vista issues.  Fairly sure my DSLR won’t connect with Vista but I can deal with that.  Starry Night Pro (which them claim works with Vista) is not working with Vista.  The company is sending me an update disk.  We’ll see…  In the meantime, I’m installing XP as a virtual PC running under Vista to see if that works.