Windows XP

Yes, WindowsXP is one of the best looking Windows OSs out there. My experience has been fairly good as compared to other versions of windows. I being a Linux user dont like the hassles Microsoft brings with it OSs. So here are my recommendations:

Advantages

1. Good stability

   
   




2. Fairly good program execution speed(means everything works a bit faster)

   
   




3. Good interface

   
   




4. User accounts (this is one of the strongest advantages over the previous versions of windows)

   
   




5. Good boot up speed

   
   

Unfortunately the disadvantages outweigh the advantages :(

Disadvantages

1. Very high number of loop holes, leaving it vulnerable to viruses!

   
   




2. Adware/Spam/Malware etc... love to target Windows XP. Gets very annoying

   
   




3. Doesnt preload all softwares in the taskbar, so its a bit irresponsive for the first two minutes of logging in

   
   




4. Annoying activation hassles

   
   




5. Patches/Updates require very high bandwidth connections besides they are very large. Not feasible for a dialup user.

   
   




6. Requires very high system resources(big harddisk, huge RAM, very good display card!)

   
   




7. Abundant no.of flaws!

   
   




8. System slows down after many hours of operation. Needs to be rebooted.

   
   




9. Lack of backward compatibility

   
   




10. Lack of old device drivers

    
    




11. Firewall has huge holes in it!

    
    




12. Antivirus fails to load many times(esp. Norton)

    
    

etc...

So basically you should really think before you buy/install this OS.