For those complaining about aero, turn it off and stop complaining about microsoft coming out with new features. I agree in that for me personally, i don't need aero so i turn it off. But other people do like it, and should we tell microsoft to stop being innovative and stop bringing new ideas and features into their OS? I think that is a big NO. Why do game developers keep trying to improve upon graphics? It's all just "eye candy" right? I think not. There is no inventions for inventions sake. Everything was done with a purpose, and that purpose was to draw more appeal to people (just like awesome looking video games). So telling microsoft to stop being innovative is not the path to take, unless you insist upon living in the year 2001.
Instead, we just need to make sure that future OS's give the user the ability to customize which features are taxing his/her system. If we don't want any of the eye candy, we should be able to turn it off. I can use vista with all of the little extras without any hiccups, but i choose to disable them because it does feel snappier.
I know this has been discussed before, but wasn't xp a very poor performing OS for a long long time? What service pack is it on, SP3? So yes XP should be very stable, but if your hardware is somewhat decent, you should be able to run Vista fine. IMHO, windows 7 is just the next SP that Microsoft isn't going to call a SP so that they can charge all of the vista owners for the better performing OS By the way where is SP2 for vista? Is it ever going to come out?
And as for Win8, it does seem like a server edition. But i would not be surprised if Microsoft is already working on Windows8/next home version of windows. They should be, as long as it is not interfering with their optimizations of vista and windows7(we need good SP's, or just perfect OS's on the first try)