If you use vista every day, and office every day, you sort through bunches of quotes that are output in .pdf format with some useless meaningless file name, you start to love vista.
Hum, pretty icon of a .pdf file.
I know, i'll zoom in on the my documents window. Oh look, vista now shows me the first page of all of those pdfs.
Much easier
Ask any student who is doing chemistry about how much they hate the MS equation editor that is buried under 4 layers of menus, or would they rather click on insert, the ribbon changes, they select equation editor.. Oh lookkkkie.
Insert a table.
Instant colours, shading, borders, with a simple dropdown box
XP display driver crash - Oh look, windows bluescreens, all data is lost
vista display driver crash - Oh look, pretty window tells me that the display driver has broken, and vista is off looking for a new one.
Windows slugsearch on xp anyone?
Vista indexing service. wow, amongst my 1000+ emails it found my password for somethingawful.com forums INSTANTLY.
XML file extensions - Get over it, smaller, can open the document in a web page if you wish... People complain that the .doc filesizes are too big, they get changed.. go cry a river or two.
User account control - Annoying as all hell, agreed.
Bottom line:
If you are using the machine for home use, basic internet browsing, odd word doccument or two as a letter to some family/friends, sure, stick with XP/office 2003.
If you are using the machine for BUSINESS use, you use more advanced functions, you are insane not to go to vista now, especially after sp1 has fixed a few of the more interesting issues. (slow file transfers)
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Anyone who complains about vista being bad has NO IDEA about how shocking XP was when it first came out....
As for using windows 95 over vista.. Huh, do you like searching for drivers when you plug in a usb stick?