After having to use windows 7 at work, here are some reasons I still use XP at home:
Familiar and stable
Lower memory footprint
More responsive
By far, the windows XP exploere.exe shell
The control panel, everything is sorted across and down so if the windows resize everything moved around. The add remove programs is way at the bottom
The login, in XP you could login very quickly and not even have to look up from the keyboard. Now in windows 7 you have to press ctrl+alt+del then wait, then press enter, then type your password. Makes me hate win 7 every time I logon
Here are a few things I can just recall off the top of my head that I dislike about the explore shell in windows 7:
No longer can drag and drop the very top left corner of folders to create a shortcut.
The address bar format in a folder browser.
The auto resorting or folder when you rename stuff.
The hiding of the + and – icons next to folder in the explore tree, saves no space just hides information until you hover over it.
The tree view always seems to jump to the wrong position than where I want.
The folder and sub folder that always expands in tree view.
The only places I want go is c:\ or Desktop the user file
The extra backwards compatibility folders that you always get access denied on when you’re thinking XP.
The fact that the Users folder starts with U so it’s always at the bottom, instead of Documents and settings towards the top.
The start menu, The recent programs and files is nice but every time I try and use it, it never has the recent file or app I’m looking for. Useless if it’s not consistent.
Don’t get me started with the windows search I’m sure there is some way to do some of the following but it’s not inherent.
o Make it faster, even with no index XP search is way faster after the first search.
o Open containing folder in new window without stopping the search.
o Search for more than one thing at a time.(Ex *.jpg *.gif)
o Search by size, date, etc, without having to know some weird text logic.
o The title bar fills with a garbage text URL string, very unprofessional.
About the only feature that I have found that makes me want to go to windows 7 at home is the nice GPU statistics you can now get in Process Explore that only shows up in windows 7. I don’t know if that’s because of a core difference or if the Process Explorer team just decided to alienate XP users.