See that's why I say remember the early days of XP. Everyone hated it. Most of the industry swore blind that M$ would can it and that 2000 was going to remain the OS of choice.
As someone who used 2000 very little and came primarily from NT/Windows98/ME, XP was a huge improvement in STABILITY. Look NT and no doubt 2000 were stable enough but they had multimedia and hardware incompatibility problems. XP because the OS you could run games on (3D) and it had the 2K/NT foundations which albeit not as good as UNIX were much better than Win98's DOS foundations. So yeah for me XP was a huge wonder, it solved most of my problems all of a sudden my Win98 box became stable (without upgrading ram or hdd space). I didn't even notice much of a performance drop - in fact for the first time (outside of NT) I could see real multi-tasking,
ie doing something heavy didn't stop everything else. Sorry but Vista is not like that, it doesn't bring in any more stability and use, but it does drain resources terribly (it's slow). Jump from 16bit/32bit hybrid OS's (Win9x) to
XP was a quantum jump, the jump from XP 32/64 to Vista 32/64 is not.
Remember for cosumers, 98SE was the OS of choice. I used NT3.5 at university and Win98/ME at home.
Maybe many business users didn't need the extra bling of XP but for home users XP was IT! XP still
does all I want on this box, I can play games, run applications (surf, email, ps, word, excel, pp)
and Vista just doesn't offer me any extra incentives - what a prettier screen? Who cares about that?
Windows 2000 was not a consumer /home user OS. It was an enterprise/business OS. Maybe if I had the ability to purchase 2K easily and run my basic apps and games on it I would still be on 2K now. Suffice to say
although XP may be a little bloat over 2K, this is no EXCUSE to add even more bloat in the form of Vista.
Even by your own standards two wrongs do not make a right.
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But about 3 weeks ago my RDP came up with an expiry warning, so I had to get the newer SP3. The newer SP3 was smaller in size. Has anyone noticed a little instability with the latest SP3?