I was informed about an online petition to save Windows XP from the inevitable toilet flushing of MicroSoft's usual timeline of planned obsolescence.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/

My view is meh tbh as the people this will effect most is those buying a new PC who have never owned one before so I don't think they would be too bothered which O/S they use and a manufacturers PC should always work with it's O/S.

I think the article is a bit OTT:

For most of us, there's really no reason to move to it -- yet we don't have a choice.

Yes you do, if you only have a manufacturers disk and what to use XP on a new PC there are ways to 'repack' this version as a 'normal' XP disk. Or simply buy a full version of XP.

Of course you'll always be able to find legit copies for sale years and years after Microsoft make an O/S obsolete, you can still get DOS from eBay ;)

I've had my fair problems with Windows I'll admit but quotes like this:

Consider this: Although Microsoft denies that anything is wrong with Vista

don't help. The majority of problems with Vista are not Microsoft's fault they are down the lack of compatibility of software and drivers from other manufacturers. I had an early trial version of Vista Ultimate and everything worked fine as far as the OS is concerned my problems (and I did have quite a lot) were all down to other manufacturers software/ hardware.

What people seem to forget is that Vista shipped with much more driver support than XP did and when XP shipped it also had it's own criticisms and again as with Vista people didn't want to change from Win98.

Millions of us have grown comfortable with XP and don't see a need to change to Vista.

Well don't but I'll be honest Vista is a fundamental change from XP but many of the changes are for the better and it doesn't take very long to get used to it. The search feature is much much better than XP for example.

Yeah, I hated it when my games that would work on Win 3.11 didn't work in XP. It is a matter of change will happen and you can wait as long as possible before embracing the changes, but they will happen and XP support will eventually fade, just like the Win98 support. Does that mean nobody out there is using Win98 or Win95? No, but they aren't going to run Office 2007, or Doom3.

Whatever works for you, you can stay with it. But, it's like trying to stay with the horse and buggy in the days of the automobile. You might be able to get where you're going with the horse and buggy, but it won't be as fast and it won't be as easy as you can't always go where the automobile can go. Same with the Windows versions.

Personally, I like Vista. Yes there are some programs I liked that worked with XP that don't work with Vista. It is a bit sad, but I like a lot of the new features and have converted over to running it on all three of my computers at home (not counting my file server which is running XP because I didn't need Vista on it to just sit there and hold my files). But, I may upgrade to the new Windows Home Server as well. I like the features.

Personally, I'm converting to console gaming and planning that my next home pc will be running some form of Linux. :)

If really pushed, I'll install xp on a dual-boot partition to run Access or other windows-only apps, but with all the Open Source software out there now, there's just not much compelling need for windows on a home computer now IMO.