XP for me is still the best thing that microsoft ever produced
it hardly crashes, it's fairly a lightweight system (even ancient machines with 256 ram can run it) it's compatible with pretty much everything and it doesnt suck the blood out of your new top-notch rig like vista does
i will be not getting vista. ever. period.
vista is a failed attempt to make a beatiful OS that will turn your hi-end pc into a 486, so the end customer is obligated to spend the big bucks to run it like XP did with a quarter of the required hardware
Microsoft's philosophy when they created the CPU hogging features of Vista was that it didn't matter if the system was such a heavy burden on the computer, because the upcoming hardware would be able to handle it (this is a true story)
although it is true that a top-notch computer can run vista and still spare a few CPU cycles to run a game or something other the OS itself, the problem remains... when one buys a top-notch rig. one expects this new and shining computer to perform outstandingly, where as with Vista, one only gets a mediocre performance, making the whole point of having this top-grade computer useless, since you could get the same performance on a much cheaper pc running XP
so no, i will stick with XP for now, thanks
and i'm glad that more people are now sharing my line of thought, and the Vista hype is over
oh, and for those that really like that Vista look, there are Vista skins for WinXP available for download that'll make it look just like the real thing... ;D

(that's the only way you'd ever see me using vista ;D)
Cheers
HarvesteR -- using WindowsXP SP2