Quote from kiwi_trader:
TUMS there is one big difference.
When XP came out most people were either using Win98 or its replacement WinME. One lacked important features and the other ... Others were running WinNT or Win2000 which gave stability etc but not the software compatibility that home users needed.
So now we have XP SP3 with good stability, good compatibility, and pretty good security, efficiency and reliability.
Along comes Vista with a couple of unimportant minor features plus some eye candy. And a new set of bugs and hardware demands.
You see what I mean?
XP is not perfect.
* The GUI just sucks big time. Compare it to a MAC or to Vista, just drag a window around the desktop and you see how hard XP sucks (also watch your cpu meter while you're doing that). Vista has its GUI based on DirectX, that's why it's so much better and everything works/moves more fluently/faster. That's actually the one thing i DO like about Vista.
* Security sucks. I don't want a website to be able to install all kinds of software to my pc without my intervention. Still, that happens all the time. Also, file sharing over a network is very difficult to setup (at least, if you want to have it secure)
* 4 gb ram limit (at least the 32bit version)
* The 'search' function couldn't be any crappier/slower. I always use 'effective file search' (
http://www.sowsoft.com/search.htm ), which functions the way the windows search function SHOULD function. Especially if you want to search for a word in a file, forget about the windows search function, it just doesn't work correctly.
* Multi monitor support still sucks (2 videocards or more)
* Multithreading support isn't very good/fast in XP
So yeah, I could use a new OS, especially GUI & security improvement and that's exactly what Vista does. Still, I've tried Vista and it just doesn't work for me (I could list the things I hate about Vista but it are probably the same things everybody seems to hate about Vista). I too do think of Vista as ME: just skip this version and hopefully the next OS will really be an improvement.