[keithwalton]

vista basic is fine with 512megs of ram, home premium (aeroglass + sidebar) on the otherhand pushes that upto a gig minimum, preferably two. With regards to plugging in cameras and such to linux computers, most cheaper cameras use a usb mass storage driver (like the usb pen drive) to download onto computers (and upload to camera as well) which is universally supported and quite nice.
Move away from cheap cameras however and your in trouble, my canon ixus 900 has its own special interface driver, last time i checked my camera was not supported in linux, at least not by canon.

Sony cameras i believe are similar in that they bespoke drivers