Here's the thing. XP sucks.

OK. As everyone knows, I have a fair bit of experience in the tech industry. I'm no Albie, I'm no Zare, but I'm pretty good too. I have extensive experience with DOS 6, Windows 3.1, Windows 98SE, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, 10.5. I haven't had a chance to play with Windows 7 nor Ubuntu yet, but one day I will. So I can say this with pretty good experience: Windows XP fucking blows.

A lot of people LOVE Windows XP. I understand why. It's dead simple and it seems to work. But it's also old. XP is 8 years old as of 3 days ago. It's the equivalent of if I bought a Mac and it was running OS X 10.0. It's that fucking old. It's a geezer.

When Windows XP came out we were cruising along with a smooth Pentium 3 1.2 ghz processor on 256 mb of SD-RAM, MOTHERFUCKER. Yeah, that's right. That was a hot computer when XP came out, not to mention the sweet Rage 128 Pro with a smokin' 16mb of VRAM. Fuck yeah. Let's play some Age of Empires II!

Anyway. What the hell is wrong with people who think that because their computer could run XP it should run fucking Vista. No wonder there was a huge backlash against Windows Vista. People were still running computers from the Clinton era and expecting it to work.

A comparison.

Recommended specs for XP:
300 mhz processor
128 mb of RAM
Video: 800x600 resolution minimum

Recommended specs for Vista:
1 ghz processor
1 gb of RAM
128 mb of VRAM; DirectX 9 support.

Chances are the average computer from when XP came out couldn't touch Vista.

Oh, sure, some rigs that can run XP can run Vista fine. But here's the deal. XP and Vista are from two different generations of computing. XP was a good system for its time, but we're moving to a new era: 64 bit computing. XP can't. XP 64 bit is terrible, and it just can't get the job done, plus no driver support.

Here's the problem.

Vista handles newer hardware better by far. Device support for XP is non-existent - for Vista it's honestly world class. Vista, however, is overloaded with crap. It has SO much crap on it. Aero is only the start. I've cut mine down using the instructions at some website I stumbled on, though, and it's beautiful.

I've never had it crash. Except for when I've been randomly shutting off services in task manager. But I've stressed the system out hardcore, and never had an issue. It handles two cores pretty much seamlessly, and can handle RAM quite well. It's an over-loaded system, but when you get it paired down, it's actually...great.

Now...why Windows 7? Windows 7 is just Windows Vista with one or two new goodies and all the crap turned off. I'm not even joking a little, based on what I've read. It doesn't offer anything new...it just offers a more system-friendly and minimalistic user experience.

I'm actually not sure if I'm gonna go to 7 or not. If I can get a 64 bit version of 7 on the cheap, possibly. Otherwise?

I think I like Vista.