That is a lot of propaganda, but little to no facts and a lot of second hand experience.
1. It takes just one option and Vista looks the same as XP. You don't need the fency look, but you CAN have it.
2. That eyecandy has an effect on office-programs, but not on games, as the desktop is disabled while playing.
3. Driversupport for Vista is AT LEAST as good as for XP for standard hardware. If you got older devices, that are no longer supported, that is a problem, of course, but that's not M$ fault, but that of the company you bought that device from!
4. My X-FI-drivers work quite fine. Not all features are supported with vista, but that is also not entirely M$ fault, because it took Creative a long time to release working drivers and they've still not released a hardware that can fully benefit from the new features. Additionally, Creative started a lawsuit on a programmer, who released drivers that fully support the X-FI under Vista and closed down his site and prohibited sharing of those drivers. You don't want to blame M$ for that, either?
After all it might interest you, that XP had a prognosted life-cycle of 4-5 years. When XP was released, there were especially the gamers who kept claiming that Win98 was the best software for running games, with ongoing support, excellent driver basis and support for their hardware, while XP had only a lot of eyecandy, even a new format (NTFS), which was a reincarnation from hell, according to many players and only suitable for running servers and professional applications.
So, I'm not really surprised that so many people fall for that end of the world scenario again. Let's face it: Negative news is always a lot more profitable than positive and the media never said what is true, but what people wanted to hear. And who would by a magazine or visit a professional hardware-forum / Homepage, that would support a person like Bill Gates?
You can of course believe what you want and stay with XP as long as you want / can. But you and I know that the nay-sayers won't change with Windows7. In fact, the opposite will happen. People start posting negative news about that windows-version, too, and then the witch-hunt just starts all over again.
It's frightening, how many people just repeat other peoples opinion, without making up their own by first hand experience. :no_sad:
@ Hitman:
I run pretty old games on my Vista (a DX5 strategy game!) - no problem with that. The problem comes with newer hardware, though, as my graphics card (ATI/AMD 4870) no longer supports these features. But as LockOners, we all know that problem from the no longer working active shadowing in LockOn, which is due to the same problem.