Windows 7 forum: Win7 or Win XP?

I'd buy a PC with Windows 7 while you still can. If you get the Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate, you can get the free XP Mode which runs as a started task under Windows 7. You can't have XP Mode with Windows 8 by the way. If you buy one with the Home Premium version of Windows 7, you can either use the any time upgrade to the Pro version or install virtualization and your own copy of XP.

Good luck.

I do so love people who talk about how great XP was, considering I remember rather vividly how people complained about it the first couple of years it was on the market. It was slow, bloated, used too much memory, my programs don't work, what are permissions, what are user accounts, what's with these ugly window decorations, there are no drivers for my hardware... Basically take the list of things people used to complain about Vista, and if you look back at the early days of XP, you'll see history repeating itself. Essentially people only are looking at the surface, and not at the deeper reasons. XP was Microsoft's convergence OS, where they moved both business and consumer users onto the same platform. Vista had a large number of under the hood improvements that made it much more efficient on modern hardware, and included a near total rewrite of the Windows UI in the form of Aero to make use of the DirectX API to allow for full 3D hardware acceleration in the Windows UI, as opposed to an antiquated 2D GDI+ system used in XP. Windows 8 is Microsoft trying to again bring platforms together. This time, namely it's Windows Phone and desktop Windows platforms, providing some degree of consistency across all platforms. While I'll be among the first to admit the Modern UI doesn't make a lot of sense on a desktop, as-is anyway, it provides a sort of gentle introduction to the Modern UI, and the hopes are that this will drive sales of smartphones and tablets running Windows. I don't think Microsoft will be unseating Apple or Google in the phone/tablet space any time soon, but that doesn't mean they can't be a profitable third place player in the market.

My bet is that by this time in 2014, everyone will have had time to adapt to the new Modern UI, and no one will think anything of it. In fact, you'll probably see people complaining about the LACK of the Modern UI when they have to work on a legacy Vista or Win 7 machine.

Aside from the missing start button and the addition of the Modern UI, Windows 7 and 8 are nearly identical from the user's perspective. WIndows 8 has a bit more hardware acceleration of the UI, and a number of under the hood improvements, but nothing too significant this time around. People are making way too big a deal out of this, and it's largely out of a simple fear of the unknown. Time marches ever onward, so you can either keep up or get left behind. Ask companies that spent ruinous amounts of money on Y2K fixes about the virtues of getting left behind.

By 2014 a new version of Windows will be out and I'm betting it will have an option to bring back the Start button. And as for most folks converting by then, most businesses are still running XP which is over 10 years old now. If you've never trained a bunch of people to use Windows, you can't imagine what a hassle it is. It's time consuming, creates costly errors while people learn, and is very expensive. Remember the saying "Make new friends but keep the old, the new are silver the old are gold". The start button and task bar are the old gold. Computers are productivity tools, not something to make folks have to reinvent the wheel.

Globally that may be true but here it's a solid win for 7. Over in China, there's another reason why XP abounds.
Bob

Thanks Jimmy,
for being nice about my rant. I usually hear people say things like "get over it". Back when Win 7 first came out I used it a couple of times on a friend's machine and then at school there were a few in the library for use that I sat on for few hours cause I kept hearing how great it was. But I was not impressed. It appeared that it was all about the visual and not the functional and once again they changed their terminology on quite a few things which seems to happen everytime Microsoft comes out with a new OS. Although I never used Vista so I can't speak for that one.

So I was confused and unimpressed by the visual stuff - seemed like a waste of ram to me. At the time I was shopping for a new pc so thats why I tried using Win 7 to see if I wanted to use it. Every single new computer for sale had Win 7 preloaded so once I decided I didn't really like it I knew I would want to keep using XP. My old pc didn't come with a disc so I bought a new version of XP Pro online as well as a new pc that came preloaded with Win 7. Then had it wiped by someone and installed the XP Pro. I loved that machine for the whole year it worked - Quad core, 8 gigs of ram, it was so fast and I could have my two ram intensive programs open (Illustrator & Photoshop) plus surf the net with no problems - which I did quite often because of school and my work. then 1 month after the warranty ran out it died.... Couldn't have happened at a worse time too because it was the end of the semester and all my final projects were due in 2 weeks, and I was broke. Ironically I had purchased my first laptop about 7 months before that as a "backup" pc which had Win 7 preloaded. I had turned it on when I first got it and started customizing it with my preferences but got frustrated every time so I actually had not turned it on for about 5 months.

So there I was....needing to get my assignments finished, plus I was working on a poster for an annual charity event which I stupidly volunteered to do months before not realizing how much homework I would have PLUS my day job which was really a day and night job as I was a live in Nanny to 2 small children and the parents were out of town. So I loaded my art programs into the laptop, had to teach myself to get used to Win 7 as best I could, do the homework, the poster and take care of the kids....ha ha busy much?
Thats what I meant by kicking and screaming....

Now that I'm used to Win 7 I don't mind it as much. IMO there are extra keystrokes required of almost everything compared to the older OS's. But my biggest problem with it is the fact that Microsoft has never addressed half of the issues that Vista, XP or even Win 2000 had so they were carried over to Win 7 (and probably Win 8 as well) and because of that there are many event errors and issues that need constant fixing. Installers get corrupted causing all kinds of problems with updates on every application, there's a reoccurring kernel event problem and it stops running - it doesn't matter how many times you reset it or do a dump it just keeps happening, there's issues with certificates becoming outdated and cannot be renewed. There are multiple critical error events to which MS support just keeps saying to ignore.... and I'm one of the lucky few that has a conflict between the Motherboard and the ENE CIR receiver to which there is absolutely NO FIX at all for it!!

I turned off the aero stuff a long time ago to be able to use the ram for my programs but I still can't have 2 open at the same time - (but thats not a Win 7 issue) the laptop only has 4 gigs and core2 duo so its much slower and yeah I'm still using it but in the next few months I hope to be buying a tower with a nice big monitor as I need one to do my work on. I don't think I will be buying Win 8 though because it took me a long time to get used to Win 7 and I'm just not in the mood...I would consider pulling out the old XP disc but then I realized I would probably spend the next 3 months after installing it just doing updates....lol