[BurritoBeans]

XP was the first version of Windows I really got to know due to not being that old, and I mean it got heavy use from me before 7 came out (We had Vista on one machine but I only used it to play Crysis since it had a nice video card in it for the time) and I left it behind for 95% of everything.

Nowadays, XP may be an ugly little OS (I can't say I enjoy the toy-like feel to it) but man, it handles a ton for me - I have a nice Thinkpad A31p which gets used a by me being that the UltraBay can do everything from floppies to DVD, there's serial/parallel connections with a Dock II on it to interface with old stuff, and it just works smooth. Sure there was a small struggle getting XP to run my screen at a full resolution, but man once I got it working it just ties all of those old bits together that I want with an OS that just does what I want it to without dragging my system down, letting me do everything I need to do with that Thinkpad. I have yet to have any more issues and that's exactly what I wanted - I tried loading Win7 as the thing should be able to run it, but I just lose 50% of my speed and all of my legacy compatibility with programs that I purposefully need that Thinkpad to run, so XP is just the way for me to go.

XP is by no means my favorite OS, but it's not a bad OS - I wouldn't give up my modern OSes for it by any means, but I wouldn't give it up for most any alternatives nowadays for what I use it with. It used to do everything I wanted just fine, and it still does on anything I have ranging from a Pentium III and upward.