In spite of the jokes and comparing Vista with Windows ME (some of which I've made myself,) I never had a lick of trouble with Vista. The only reason I finally replaced my machine was because of Chrome no longer updating for Vista, and TurboTax no longer loading under Vista.
Otherwise, a ten year old PC with dual core processors was still doing everything I needed to have done. I could have loaded Windows 10 on it, but I didn't trust the hardware to last much longer. I've already replaced the power supply once, and rigged up fans inside to compensate for the dead fan on the video card.
In many respects, PC hardware has plateaued, and changes to the OS are just for the sake of change.
[[and rigged up fans inside to compensate for the dead fan on the video card.]]
Yuo can get really cheap video cards- they aren’t hard at all to install-
Yup. How much processing speed do home users really need? Not nearly as much as they think. The only way to generate revenue is through planned obsolescence. I'm pretty much a power user as I always have a bunch of stuff all running simultaneously. Last year I discovered when I try to upgrade VMWare workstation, (not a cheap program) that I couldn't because VMWare no longer supports the processor for my system. It's an i7 CPU (930), and isn't supported apparently because of some newer virtualization instructions they now require aren't a part of that chipset. Yeah, it's a 1st gen "bloomfield", but it's still a freaking i7. So, in order to upgrade the software, I have to upgrade my CPU. Well, that's not going to happen for a while, so VMWare will have to wait for a while for more money from me.
I just haven't seen any indication that I'm going to get much bang for my buck in an upgrade. I've been using Linux for a long time, so I've generally upgraded about once every 7-10 years. In the past, there has always been a huge jump in tech, processor power, and memory management from one generation of my desktop to the next. I'm just really not seeing the likelihood of that kind of boost even if I were to upgrade to the latest and greatest processor. I saw a bit of a bump up when I swapped out my hard drive for a SSD, but I doubt even a full system upgrade will be even that much more impressive.
I just went and looked at my original receipt for this system and am kind of surprised that I put it together in November of 2010. Time flies!