As an XP user all I can say is GO TO HELL Microsoft. I am done with your carnival sideshow of needless upgrades and pointless eye candy.
Once XP is completely dead, then I guess I'm done with Windows entirely.
I'm also a dedicated XP user. You are being unreasonable.
I have been using Windows 7 for a couple of months. Without having metrics to back up my personal experience, I find that it does everything at least as well as XP, and many things better.
you forgot to mention that it also does a lot of things worse
Most noticeably, it has a user interface which doesn't look like it was designed in the mid 1990s.
...but requiring hardware produced in 2010s. switch the aero off and the remains will not even equal the clean nice look of windows 2000
It looks and 'feels' a hell of a lot better, as well as being vastly more customizable. Maybe this doesn't matter to you, but it does to me and I would suggest to most computer users.
you probably meant most amateur computer users.
Overall the UI in Windows 7 looks good and is very responsive.
Various other things work a lot better than they used to - for instance, my laptop has an HDMI port. This was a constant nightmare on XP, and frequently didn't work at all or did weird things like resetting my display settings for the laptop itself whenever it was connected to a TV.
being hdmi is irrelevant. resetting display settings is not that annoying. moreover, most good cards come with utilities that overcome this xp bug and you switch the monitor and resolution on the fly from cards' utility
Windows 7 just figures out what it is plugged into and switches to the most appropriate video-out mode. Similarly, whereas switching screens under XP frequently causes issues with a video that was playing fine on one screen not transferring to another without restarting playback, in Win 7 this seems to happen seamlessly. Audio likewise is a lot simpler and easier to configure.
Unlike Vista, MS seems to have done a good job of working out when additional security is appropriate - e.g. when software wants to actually make changes to installed components or add drivers to the system, a password or fingerprint scan is required, but I am yet to be annoyed at an inappropriate time as I was in Vista.
Games seem to work just as well as they do in XP, which is a huge contrast to Vista (which came with my laptop and ran games like an absolute dog).
It starts up and shuts down a lot more quickly than XP.
LOL. on my old 1GHz/512ram/pata hdd i have 22 seconds from ntldr to busy cursor gone. windows 7 doesn't even install on that
The media centre (can't remember what it's called) is actually pretty good for use on a plasma TV.
so does media player classic home cinema. even better.
However, most noticeable is that most of the time I DON'T notice that I'm using Win 7, or any particular OS - stuff just works properly without any real need for fiddling around.
then you're probably not using windows explorer at all. and right clicking on taskbar items to bring up the applications' system menu, neither. and the start menu shutdown-confirmationless item, also
So, from one XP adherent to another, I say: maybe you should give it a go. Vista was a horror from the pits of hell as far as I am concerned. MS may be a big evil lumbering corporate monster, but someone there appears to have taken the problems with Windows by the balls and actually focused on making an operating system that has the following features: modern; actually works even on modest hardware;
does this (1Gb ram, 16 Gb hdd) look modest to you ?
good user experience. My experience so far indicates that they have largely succeeded.
... at making impression to home users. in enterprise, this is just a second vista. joining a samba/nt4 domain is a pain in the ass or impossible.
