Stick with XP. Unix is an outstanding industrial operating system, but Unix on a PC for personal use is only something true geeks can enjoy.
In fact, stick with XP over Vista or Windows 7 for that matter. If you’re happy with XP for hosting Word and a web browser to surf the web and read email, you don’t need anything else. Businesses and government never bought into the marketing hype of vista and are still sticking with XP for the most part. Windows 7 is just Vista that works, and Vista/W7 is mostly marketing hype. Fundamentally, for the average PC user, Windows 7 has no real advantages over XP, and as far as I can tell, does most everything slower and worse than XP.
You really ought to be charging for this information. It’s incredibly valuable to me. Thank you SO much!
That's one of the great things about OS X. A user never has to know he's working on certified UNIX™.
Fundamentally, for the average PC user, Windows 7 has no real advantages over XP, and as far as I can tell, does most everything slower and worse than XP.
It is quite a bit better. One simple thing is those annoying UAC boxes that popped up everywhere when you tried to do the least little thing. Those are a security feature of the OS above XP, but they were so annoying people turned them off. The security of various abilities and components has been completely refactored for Win7, in fact much of the security model has been overhauled under the direction of Mark Russinovich. So now you have the security without so many dialogs popping up. Other than that there are literally hundreds of improvements so that a user is likely to find something positive. Font handling finally got improved, Windows Media now natively handles H.264, DNSSEC is built in, etc.