Vista, XP or W7RC? Read first post before voting.

[Beskar]

All the Windows 98 fanboys used to hate XP. People simply dislike change.

[caravel]

All the Windows 98 fanboys used to hate XP. People simply dislike change.

That's a rather typical strawman argument, that I've heard many times before. People, particularly gamers, resisted XP because at the time it was bloated, buggy and full of security holes. This trend continued up until around the release of SP2, by that time many more people had moved to XP and it was starting to become the de facto standard OS for gamers.

People will use what works for them, it's not about "disliking change" it's simply futile to upgrade if there wasn't a need for it. By your logic everyone should have upgraded to Vista, but many of those that did are now kicking themselves.

Back in 2001 when XP was released, PC gaming was alive and kicking and the end user had at least three makes of graphics card to choose from. Win98SE was very light and fast and made perfect sense to the gamer - it was the right choice back then.

In general MS' OS and the DirectX API takes a step forward and the rest of the software industry has to play catch up. There are few games that require Vista/Win7 and there is no software worth it's salt that requires them either. Pretty much anything will run on XP.

Nowadays people have faster systems and XP is well patched - XP runs well on today's hardware. Windows 7 will certainly have it's day also. Vista on the other hand will probably go down in history as another WinME. Why install a lot of bloat now for the sake of some extra bells and whistles? The smart end user waits until it's all nice, tested and patched.

[Beskar]

You did notice I said "upgrade to XP" and not "Upgrade to ME" ?

Windows ME was the worst OS I ever had the displeasure of using (along with a couple of Linux OS). I remember having this Error message pop up randomly which wouldn't go away and cause your computer to go nuts if you clicked "OK", so I used to stick the error message hidden in the corner as the computer worked fine as long as you didn't click it. At the time it was, the computer was getting an update installed (I think it was a network card for Broadband) so this tech guy was doing it, I explicitively left orders "Do not press on the OK" and guess what? the idiot kept pressing it and kept restarting then saying he couldn't do his job. As I had school and returned with him there still messing around with it, I had to tell him off as I explicitly left orders and he didn't do it and it took me 5 minutes to get everything working when this tech guy was apparently there for hours.

[Aemilius Paulus]

All the Windows 98 fanboys used to hate XP. People simply dislike change.

Well, as for me, I agree with that more than with any other post here. Computers are advancing tremendously every year in specs such as RAM and processor, so having Windows 7, which is less bloated then Vista, but still more so than XP has little effect. I once remember picking up a computer magazine from 2005 and staring in shock as I saw the shoddy computer specifications for the computers advertised there.

I like XP more than Vista, as the vast majority of people. Windows 7 looks neat from what I read/saw/heard about it, but I still think it is moving towards the bloatware trend. Chances are, I will like XP more. But that is little different from a 70/60 year old dismissing computers as "crazy newfangled piece of rubbish". People need to move on. From what I know, Windows 7, especially once it will be moderately patched up through time, will be a worthy successor to XP. Seriously, updating your XP in 2012 will be hemorrhoidal, as we say in Russia. Notably the drivers.