Just drag and drop on to the flash drive and then copy it from flash drive to your PS3 hard drive through the XMB. It's very user friendly.
You could also just download PS3 Media Server and not have to use any of the space on your hard drive at all..
Vista's not as bad as people make it out to be.
The thing with Vista is that you have to do a lot of tweaks and configuration with it so that it works to your liking [i.e. no more permission popups, defenderpopups, etc]. For the most part, a lot of the tweaks are very easy to do and you can...