In the very unlikely event that Microsoft makes no changes at all, I would still choose this OS over Vista any day of the week. Sure it does use a lot of RAM, but with memory prices as low as they are, you'd be better off to get a couple more gigabytes than stick with eight year old XP. Let's face it, XP has lived a long and successful life. Somebody buy it an aluminum walker! One of the main reasons it has lived for so long is that it runs on barely half-decent hardware. However, with hardware quickly progressing and getting faster every day, handling a relatively "heavy" OS is not much of an issue anymore. Honestly, Vista was ahead of the mainstream hardware and that explains the bad press it got and still receives. Windows 7 may not have all that much to offer you over XP or Vista, but you will have to upgrade eventually and the way I see it, the sooner the better. Even though there isn't anything clearly revolutionary, it adds a bunch of small things that make the whole experience that much more interesting.