I gotta side with Bill on this one. Windows Vista is the second-biggest failure that Microsoft has ever shipped. (The worst one being the abortion known as Windows ME.)
Gary, I disagree re: people would never upgrade their OS if they feared the new version. I ran Win 95, and when 98 came out I tried it. But I didn't like all the bloat that came with it, and I thought all the active desktop crap was completely useless. (I don't need or want to use my desktop file viewer to browse web pages! That's what I have a browser for!) So I installed 98 lite, which allowed me to keep the Win 95 explorer shell. This increased the speed of the machine and also reduced my crashes.
I stayed away from Windows ME and Win 2000, because at the time I was getting along just fine with 98 lite. But when XP came out, I switched. And you know what? XP still rocks. I *like* XP.
Unfortunately, it's getting hard to find a machine that ships with XP these days. When I bought my son a laptop for college, it came with Vista. What a pain in the ass! The machine is running 2 gigs of ram on a Pentium T2080 Core Duo processor, and yet a lowly Althlon XP 3200 + with just a gig of ram (but running XP) is actually faster! Think about that for a moment... That's a 3 year + difference in CPU generations, yet the XP machine is faster.
Sure, Vista is pretty. And there are a few nice features (the User Account Control <cancel or allow> gets a lot of grief, but if you run Spybot or any other monitoring software you get the same thing) that probably should have been incorporated into the OS a long time ago. But these few upgrades are not enough to entice me to switch.
Also, with regard to Mark's comment that the only reason they're still selling XP is because there is a market for it, I disagree. They have killed other versions of the OS in the past to *force* people to upgrade, even when there was still a market for the old version. But this time there are large companies that are *demanding* that they be allowed to buy XP, under threat of switching to other platforms.
Under extreme pressure from some of these heavyweights, MS caved in and started selling XP again. But make no mistake... They'd much rather force you to buy their shiny new product. They're just afraid that if they discontinue XP they'll force a bunch of corporate users to abandon MS products for Linux. But mark my words, the day is coming when you won't be able to buy XP anymore. (And man, is that going to suck!)
Adam