Just a quick vote of support that perfectly sane people still run Windows XP
(when they absolutely positively must run Windows), and will continue to for a
very long time.
I have an 8-year-old laptop on which I've informally benchmarked various OS'es
for Web client stack performance. On Unix the NIC driver required an emulation
layer that slowed things down. And among Windows versions, XP was the fastest
`(and I'm not the only one with this experience)
<http://betanews.com/2009/08/07/windows-xp-sp3-runs-browsers-13-faster-than-windows-7-rtm/>`_.
I think XP is also the last version that allows you to fully uninstall some
crud, including all versions of Dot-Net.
