> Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems
I by no means am some Microsoft hater, but I'm amused about this tinted rose glass nostalgia for XP. It's easy to say XP is a good system now with the maturity of three service packs and the bad taste of Vista still in our mouths, but I remember all those years ago much dislike of XP around the internet. Among other things, it was a security nightmare that wasn't even fixed until SP2. You put release day XP on your machine and put it on the internet and you're machine will be probably hacked within the hour.
On the other hand not to many people stuck with Vista. A fully patched Vista installation works just fine nowadays. It still has higher system requirements, but those requirements are now 4 year old systems.