I installed a fresh copy with SP3 already in it and then did all of the updates to make it current.

Umm, yes it is. Red Hat 1.0 came out in 1994. Windows XP, OTOH, is still supported.

I'm pretty sure Linux consistently uses the memory it can for FS caching.

You shouldn't have to "reinstall a few times" since 2011. That was finally the last straw for me. If you want Windows running fast, you seem to have to reinstall it about every 9 months.

Oh it most certainly is. I installed Windows XP SP3 on a laptop the other day and the updates took at least 2 hours to install. It's not a brand new laptop, but it's reasonably capable. It also needed many reboots, and the most annoying thing about it was that it was a multi-phase thing to install updates (eg. install 20 of them, reboot, install 130 of them, reboot, install 7 of them, reboot -- something like that). Which meant you couldn't just start it and walk away.

What color laser doesn't work on Linux?

I've run across Windows installs of apps being so broken that you couldn't install or uninstall them without going to the registry. Really never so with Linux. You remove it with the package manager or rm and it's gone. No mystery voodoo junk somewhere else to worry about.

I have had it be a lot harder to install a printer in Windows than in Linux. Linux, I plugged it in, it was recognized, and that was that. Windows XP I had to go find the driver, get it to install, and it got cranky about being connected to USB before the driver was installed, etc.

Video games are a poor substitute for volunteer work, being active and outside (which is good for you), or spending time with other humans. Reading I suppose I'll give you.

TurboTax has a lot of weird Dot Net and other types of dependencies that seem to be part of the problem.

TurboTax is such a major pain in the ass. It doesn't even work properly in a Windows XP VirtualBox and works pretty poorly in a Windows 7 VirtualBox. I didn't even try WINE this year.

This is not always true. Especially for older games, which is what I like. Worms Armageddon, for example, was a couple of minutes to get working on Linux with WINE. Windows 7 was a major hassle, and we looked for info for hours before we figured out what was going on. Worms World Party, for what we could figure out, couldn't be played at all on Windows anymore.

Dot net is screwed up on my workstation in such a way that even removing every piece of it and reinstalling it will not get me to a situation where it will succeed installing the updates. The fix it programs don't work, suggestions on the web -- nothing. Linux has never been that annoying.

Was going to post that link. It's a friend of a friend's project. It doesn't perfectly solve the problem, but it's getting there.

People who take this kind of shit from employers are a reason we're in this predicament. The employer can fire you at will in a place, but if he thinks the rest are going to walk out if he does pulls this, it's not going to happen. If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.