I still love the OS as much any of their Previous or Future Versions

I agree, just when XP was just about perfect, MS rolled out Vista which was like XP just covered in a new GUI. i think that's why vista had so many problems because the core was xp but then they built a new gui on it making it have lots of problems. I hear 7 fixes that problem though since i heard they almost built it from the ground up starting with the whole kernel of the os.. 7, from my own experience is way less resource hungry than vista, it doesn't eat up all my ram and i can do things faster with it too. When i upgrade from xp, i'd definitely go for 7 and not vista. vista sucks big time. I think MS, like any other company, has made a mistake when they prematurely rolled out vista. I think it was not a mature os when they released it so it was awful. I hope MS learns from this experience though and see that complication is not necessarily more or better. They should keep things as simple as they can and not rush things.

I too think that XP is probably the best operating system developed by Microsoft. I think that the fact that it is more stable than the other OS makes it more popular than Vista or Windows 7. I think the graphics are amazing on Vista and Windows 7 but XP allows you to do more. The only downside to XP is that you can't program in DirectX 10 or 11 so I am stuck with DirectX9. These are Vista and Windows 7 exclusive. I have a Vista theme on my XP because I really like the look of Vista so I just try and emulate it as much as I can. There is also a Windows 7 theme that has been released but I am going to wait until it becomes more popular.

Why the decline? I think you mentioned it, Vista. Just we everyone got used to XP, they decide to roll out another OS that had it's fair share of problems. Less is more. The folks over at Microsoft need to adopt that philosophy. I was thinking about using linux as the main OS for the laptop I plan on buying later this year.

Yeah I think Windows XP is great, but Windows 7 is awesome too :) At first Windows 7 looks bad with the taskbar, big blocks, etc. but you can customize it easily to look exactly like XP in terms of the taskbar, which I did as soon as I got Windows 7 on my pc. The only thing I didn't like about Windows 7 was the fact that it wasn't compatible with a lot of programs I use often, or worked in a different way, which is why I have gone back to Windows XP. I will probably go for Windows 7 again when I need to reinstall my pc once more, or I buy a new one. Vista totally sucked.