i love xp. lynch me if you must, but there it is.
why? because it's old enough and stable enough that i can hack it to pieces without fear of messing anything up beyond repair. or at least if i do, i can usually fix it. my xp install is thoroughly reshacked. i use an alt shell and alt file manager, plus lots of extra apps and utilities to make it extremely productive for the way i work. i know my way around, and i can get things done fast.
i never used vista, so when i jumped deep into 7 the other day, i felt a bit overwhelmed. i was struggling to find dialogs that i knew should exist. that was, of course, until i realized that i only had to search for them in the start menu. suddenly, the entire OS was a few keystrokes away. oh, the power! after a few hours of exploration (which i enjoyed immensely), i'm starting to feel at home.
still, basic tasks on 7 are taking me much, much longer than they did in XP. this is because i've been having trouble getting my file manager to work on 7, but i just read on their forum that someone else has had success, so i'm not giving up yet. once i get it installed, my productivity in 7 will increase dramatically (i really, really hate using explorer. single pane file management is the worst idea ever!).
i'm not an average user, but i'm not an IT technition either. i float comfortably in the middle, grateful for my intuitive understanding of software and how to get what i want out of a computer. the thing i miss the most in 7 is being able to customize the UI, but not long after the final release a uxtheme.dll patch will show up and visual styles will start appearing on deviantart. in the meantime, 7 already looks pretty sexy, much better than Vista i think.
so in the end, while i love XP, i most definitely don't hate 7. in fact, i'm already pretty certian that when 7 is released commercially, my XP partition will get formatted. well, maybe i'll wait until SP1 - we'll just have to see how much software compatibility improves over the next year
