I have used every Microsoft OS going back to DOS 3 except for Windows NT. I have to say I liked Windows 2000 and XP the best because they just worked. My wife got a laptop half a year ago with Vista 64 on it and I HATE it with a passion. It takes so much longer to boot up than my XP machine and her laptop is pretty decent. Defrags take forever to the point I don't want to do it anymore, which begs the question of why they changed the defragger tool from the one with XP which worked fine. It's so bloated and full of junk neither my wife or I want. I even spent a lot of time disabling various features to free up more memory, including Aero (yes I do like the Windows classic look better after using it since Win 95) and still it gobbles memory like crazy. I have about the same amount of free memory with my 2 GB desktop machine running XP as the laptop with 4 GB running Vista 64 does, which is sad.
I must admit I have heard glowing reports about Windows 7 over the last few months and it's tempting. I haven't bothered to get the release candidate yet though because I'd have to buy another hard drive to put it on and quite frankly I'm a bit lazy about having to install a bunch of stuff again
I might upgrade to it when it actually comes out but I do wonder what's the point? My XP machine runs great and I haven't gotten a crash in a long time (knocks on wood). I would certainly put Windows 7 on a new machine when I decide to build the next one. What new features besides it running better than Vista will I have to look forward to then?