Off Topic: XP vs. Windows 7

Thanks to my soon to be eleven year old daughter's ultimate curiosity for all things downloadable I recently had to reload my XP machine at home.  I couldn't find my XP disc and I had a copy of Vista and Windows 7 available.  I started with Vista as I was worried that the 6+ year old machine with its Pentium 4 3.0Ghz processor and 2 GBs of RAM would perform sub optimally on Windows 7.

I loaded vista and first thing out of the shoot I had driver problems.  Thank god for extra machines because the driver in question was the network card (for non-techies this is bad if you like internet things).  I found the appropriate drivers and uploaded them.  Presto I was running Vista.  On a promo version time-bombed for 30 days from install.  Oops.  No problem, I just go to activemyvistacopy.com or some such nonsense.  Oops again, website doesn't exist.  Quick Google search shows that it has been inactive for 2 years.  Oops.

I had a valid copy of Windows 7 so I decided what the heck - time to upgrade.  Again.  Thankfully the vista drivers flowed through and all my custom hardware (I build the PC from scratch over 6 years ago) all worked like a charm.

A week later and I have to admit - it actually works better than XP.  Small victory for a lost Saturday.

-Kris