Oh wait, my Win 7 x64 rig just exploded and ran out of the room screaming, never mind, stick with XP.
7 rocks. XP is junk. How many patches, updates and service packs does it take to install XP today? All that trash and retrash is just that - trash.
Yup and my philosophy is "wait for SP2 before you consider a new OS". I did it with NT, 2000, XP but server 2008 could be an exception with the R2 release.
I've owned PC's since the 70's wtf do I know compared to the wizards and genii that post at ET. That's right, some of you know it alls were protozoa when I was already hacking code. Defy my wisdom at your own risk. Which one were you?
7 may indeed "rock", but your comment on XP is illogical. 7 is new and all of the conceptual fixes found in XP updates and patches have been incorporated into 7. It will also have lots and lots of patches in the future. If Microsoft were to produce an XP installation disk with all of its patches incorporated into a "SP4", installing it would be about the same as 7. They are not going to do that, of course, because they want to separate you (needlessly?) from more of your money. Current XP users can easily pass on W7. Microsoft has already said that before XP goes out of support there will be YET ANOTHER new OS... W8?
Here is a web page that listed all the features of Win 7. See if there is anything that you gotta have, like IE 8, Aeropeek (which I turned off), enhanced calculator (Wow!), HomeGroup (this one is nice if you have multiple computers), Scenic Ribbon, Paint and Wordpad (Double Wow!), Enhanced Start Menu, Blu-Ray support, etc. etc.. http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/ff.asp
XP and 7 are completely different. 7 uses the same platform as Server2008 which rocks. It's what I would use for an OS across the board if the price was the same. To say or imply that 7 is anything close to XP sp4 could not be more incorrect. And Microsoft denies the rumors about 8. I don't know what the basis of your statement is. There are still some people on Win95 but they're certainly not trading with it and you would not build a new box today with it.