I have used almost ALL OSes from the Microsoft stable, starting with MS DOS Ver 1.1, moving on to MS DOS Ver 5.0 (with my old 386 laptop), MS DOS Ver 6.22 (my long standing friend), on to the really useless Win 95, 97, 98, ME GUI platforms (with the Win 3.1 and 3.11 for workgroups in between!) and finally on to Win XP (SP2). Yes, I have tried Win Vista and I have this to submit, at the end of my journey through the world of Microsoft OSes :-
I found the Stability of MSDOS lacking in all the primarily-GUI versions of Windows (95 through to ME). This was the major drawback of these OSes - they gave the user a facade on which he could operate, believing that he was actually interacting with the system (which is the role of the OS). Then came Win 2000, and it’s platform-successor, Win XP -
Win XP is a Stable, User-friendly and largely customizable (with the help of some good non-standard-pattern documentation) OS, which is a dream to use - owing to it’s phenomenal speed, especially over the new 2GB RAM based systems in vogue these days.
Win XP is far better than Win Vista and I would recommend it to any new user.