I'm not surprised at all that W7 is rivalling Vista, after all, it's only really what Vista should have been in the first instance n'est-ce pas? I've no intention of wrestling to edge XP off my netbook for arguments sake, it runs beautifully already, has support for probably longer than the netbook's own lifespan, and is a mature OS which already got all the tweaking you can imagine done to it to make it perform as users require.

What will tip the figures are OEM sales of W7 over the Xmas period, which isn't so much people buying W7 for W7's sake - but will simply reflect the fact they can get new hardware which comes with W7, and at no more expense than OEM versions of Vista or XP would have set them back.

First: My desktop runs Win 7 7600 X64 and runs it great. I have but one issue with it and that is that I had to turn off Hybrid sleep or about 30 seconds after it comes out of sleep it hangs and I must do a hard shutdown. This seems to be a cross platform issue and I think it is the chipset drivers and will be solved slowly part and parcel by the individual vendors updating thier drivers.

I have eight computers running in my home; 6 @ XP Pro, 1 @ Vista, and Mine at Win 7 Ultimate. I have no intentions of upgrading the others to 7 untill it becomes necessary to do so. Why should I? They run great and havn't ceased handling anything they are being used for. All are current builds, dual core 3+Ghz with 2Gig of ram each. They are capable of 7 but 6 @ $200 is big bucks.

I work for the Post Office but repair and upgrade computers on the side for little more than the fun of it. I'm constantly asked when I recieve a computer for repair or upgrade (with nervousness in their voice) "do I need to upgrade to (then) Vista and (Now) Win 7? I ask them what they ues thier computer for and make a recomendation. Almost exclusively I recommend they stick with XP untill they make the upgrade to a whole new computer. Then I recommend they buy a name brand at a reasonable price.:)

Most people that I meet use thier computer for surfing the internet, paying bills, email, chat, photo archiving... Nothing that requires Quad core 8Gig of ram Win 7... I think Vista got a bad rap in the begining but with the service packs it became a reasonable OS. I do see that people would switch from Vista to 7 even though Vista is running stable for them now because many of these are people that switched from XP to Vista.

XP will go away and like Qdos said it will happen mostly through upgrading whole systms. For these XP users why should they spend $150.00 for a new OS when they can get the whole system for under $300.00. Lets get real here.

I'll 2nd that!...My Vista PC gave me fits for over a year and has since calmed down and runs like a reliable race horse...I did buy a copy of WIndows 7 for a Vista laptop which now it is humming like a winner of American Idol! I have an XP netbook that still runs fine so that's staying that way. I bought a new PC with WIN 7 64 bit installed (killer deal at BJs!) so I'm toying with it now. My old XP PC just crashed and burned so I'll decide what I want to do with its carcass in the coming weeks...

I toyed once with maybe getting a small 'Mac' but I was turned off by all the layers of differing 'experts' and displays at that store. More important, they didn't have one on display and just a few lame excuses why they didn't...they don't want to sell that model when they can make so much more $$$ pimping the high-end models I suppose. If I ever did get one, It's gonna be the lower cost model, for many reasons...

After Vista users switch to 7, after Christmas when people buy new computers with Windows 7 and when Mac users buy Windows 7 to install on their Macs, the XP users are eventually gonna switch to 7 after all the peer pressure. :)

Aren't these figures a little bit misleading? Is alot of this not accounted for with people wanting to run the latest OS, which would be the reason they were running Vista in the first place?

Good point Blue. People on this forum are enthusiasts and want to have the latest OS. I started with 7 beta/ Vistax64 dual boot last year and there was no way I wasn't going to buy 7 when it came out.
I also agree that 7 will convert a lot of XP die hards but Vista ended up as a great OS, just not as good as 7.
Many people will buy a new pc in the UK before VAT goes back up so they'll get it anyway and, because reviews are positive, there will be less of that "downgrading" stuff.
People wouldn't want to downgrade to Vista anyway and it would be daft to stick with XP at this stage in the game.

Cheers, john:)