one monkey typing

I'm moving back to Windows XP. The experimentation with Linux helped me make this decision. To decide to move back away from Linux, I thought along the lines of "What does Linux give me that I can't get in Windows, and vice versa?" The answer was that I got nothing from Linux that I couldn't get with Windows (though there are a few minor things that are somewhat easier under Linux, but there are things I simply can't do under Linux, or which are a significant pain in the butt).

One day with Windows 7 after a month away, and the niggling things that were bothering me a little before started really winding me up. So I applied the same logic; What does Windows 7 give me that I can't get under XP, and vice versa? Again, the answer was that Win7 gives me nothing apart from a little eye candy, while taking away some admittedly possibly minor things, but things that just bother me almost every time I do ANYTHING on the machine. Microsoft is just going in a direction that I don't like, in most ways. And I certainly won't miss the eye candy; I spent a few hours with Windows 7 trying to figure out how to turn all that irritating crap off.

The only real concern here is that XP is really at the limit of what it can handle with this machine; 4 CPUs and 4 GB of RAM. But I guess I can live with that. I really don't have any intention of expanding past that anyway. It can handle HD video just fine, and apart from HD video, I was actually OK with the old single core, 2GB RAM machine. In fact, it seemed to me that HD playback was maybe just a touch smoother and cleaner on XP when I tried it just now than it was under 7. My trial a few weeks back didn't seem to indicate that, but I did get a newer video driver under XP this time around so that may be the difference.

I think I do need to install a hotfix to get XP to hibernate successfully with > 2GB of RAM, but even if that doesn't work out, I can live without hibernation.

EDIT: I think I found the source of the previously felt slowness in XP: Don't allow BOINC to use the graphics processor to run computations while the computer is in use. This isn't a problem under Linux or Win 7, but in XP it makes the GUI just freeze for a second or three at a time. The rest of the normal CPU computations can run while active, but not the CUDA (graphics processor) one.