Reply #91: I'm an analyst/developer

[FarrenH]

Who had to unnofficially support 2 Vista users at the small company I last worked at (because we were small and a marketing company, all the devs ended up supporting the clueless markting guys). They insisted on Vista against our advice, we stuck to XP. It was a nightmare. Networking, progressive bloating... the marketing director's laptop got slower and slower every day. Every fix was temporary. We'd marginally improve something one week, then a week later the same shit would happen.

I recently upgraded my oldish laptop to Windows 7 and ran into a host of problems caused by (a) third party code libraries being buggy on 7 and (b) code, and my development environment, not being able to access files and services because they didn't run as administrator. It took about a week to sort out. An upgrade from the third party vendor and a bunch of shortcuts to launch certain programs in Admin mode, but after that everything runs smoothly. PC ran a benchmark test comparison between XP SP 3 and Vista SP 1 and XP beat Vista on 9 out of 10 tests.

The thing is the underlying architecture of 7 is wayyyyyyyy superior to Vista. The problems users may be experiencing now are transition issues. Windows 7 actually beats XP on dozens of benchmarks. I'd use XP on some older machines, but 7 isn't a steaming pile of shit the way Vista was.