I used XP from the time of its inception, until I my fingers were finally pried away from my dying dinosaur computers last year.
I went out and bought a new E-machines computer with Windows 7 on it, and so far it’s been as reliable and user friendly as my old XP system ever was.
Just curious, but why would you want to go back to XP now?
I'm pretty much forced to use Windows 7, because I have 64-bit applications. Sure there was a 64-bit version of XP, but it's pretty hard to get support for it anymore especially with software updates. My biggest complaint is the number of devices for which there are no 64-bit Windows 7 drivers. I recently had to buy a refurbished 32-bit dual core Dell Windows XP Workstation on EBay to run my large format scanner. The computer built in 2003 bundled with the scanner had Windows 2000 and was way underpowered with just an 850 Mhz Pentium III and 256 MB RAM to be able to process images after scanning. I bought a workstation class machine with 3GB ECC RAM, because I wanted to make sure its components would last at least 10 years.
It's pretty ridiculous that a $20K scanner would have to be abandoned due to lack of Windows 7 drivers. I think it's also ridiculous that Microsoft is dropping XP Professional support on April 8, 2014. I can understand them dropping support for the lame Home version, but there are lots of expensive devices used by businesses that will never have drivers for newer versions. I'm sure after the end of support, future servers won't support Windows XP clients, so it will be more difficult to share files created by devices that must be connected to machines running XP.
I’m using xp on a computer that was built from scratch with all new parts 3 years ago. I figure I’ll upgrade my 3 year old homebuilt computer to windows 9 when it comes out, or at least attempt it. If it won’t go, then I’ll switch to linux. Until then, I’m sticking with xp...and skipping vista, 7, and 8.