Idk, I didn't upgrade to XP until like 3 years after it came out. I'm never a first adopter of an OS, there's no point really.

@Canch,

Perhaps people know other people who have Vista? Perhaps they have to use Vista at work/school? Perhaps they were in the Vista beta?

for games it's the same as vista also, there is a huge hit in perfomance.

They just renewed the downgrade to xp program for another year.

Vista has been a massive clusterfuck for microsoft.

I hear they've learned tho, as it appears win7 is rather nice. If they were smart they'd market it as XP 2.0

i just got an new lappy.. n its pretty mid- upper spec so vista runs well on it. But on lesser systems vista can be a bitch especially intel graphic systems..

windows 7 i havent tried yet but i now have a defunct hp laptop n im gonna try running hackintosh on it, or even win 7 beta.. apaarently windows halves ur lappy battery life.. compared to macs.. now thats a real piss off

I don't particularly care. Ubuntu is far, far better than Windows for everything except gaming. I keep XP around to game on, but I really only play older games (Diablo II, Age of Empires series, Halo 1, Vice City, Doom series, KOTOR, Gunz, etc).

Windows 7 is completely inconsequential for me. Ubuntu 9.04 comes out this month, and I'm sure it will be awesome. I can do everything in Ubuntu that you can do in Windows (except gaming), but for me it's faster, less resource-intensive, safer, more stable, and far prettier.

aww I like Vista... :(

Vista isn't a failure. I'm sure about 99% of the people who use Vista don't even know what an operating system is. I'm a computer technician so I'm well aware all the people want from an OS is the the ability to play MP3s and stream porn.

As far as geeks like you and I, Windows 7 may actually break us away from Windows XP atleast for our newer machines. But I still think XP will be ideal for machines without a dual core or gigs of memory.

I haven't read/seen any Win7 marketing. I'm talking 100% only from experience with it.

And yes, it addresses that problem too. It doesn't address it well - it DOES have that as a problem - but it has it less. Program compatibility isn't an issue, anyways, if you know what you're doing. My main system runs Vista by default and I've had no issues whatsoever with getting programs that "don't work" to run.

Win7 has that same issue, but to a lesser degree. Even so, most programs that are that old and still don't have a newer version to use... probably aren't worth using anyways and likely have a better, newer counterpart available nowadays.

I have a question; If I get a laptop now with Vista, would it kill me if I didn't get Windows 7 when that's released? I need one for college, so I can't wait for it to be released, but I don't know if upgrading would be worth it or not.