We all know Bill Gates is rich and one of the reasons is he keeps coming out with new operating systems (OSs) that we the end user thinks will be better. Each time we up grade Bill makes money. I have had all of his OSs but find XP the best for my way of computing but may not be for you. A lot of my software that I use is old and is not compatible with later OSs, So I keep and old computer with the XP OS running on it. My wife has a low end laptop using Vista. Vista is a nightmare OS and if you have a machine with Vista I would get a new computer at once. I would compare Vista to the worst OS ever, Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows ME. Windows 7 is is a good platform and most of the software from XP will run on it. I have 2 computers with 7 installed and I like the OS pretty well. The file layout is basically the same as XP and files are easy to fine unlike Vista. With Vista you never know where stuff will be found. Now comes Bill's latest creation Windows 8. I don't have 8 installed on any computer as yet, but I will soon as I just want to try it out. From the looks of it I think it will be a challenge tho. It looks to be very different from other OSs. You can see a tutorial at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ijE3RSeTrU
One good thing is that Microsoft will sell you a downloadable upgrade copy for about $40.00. If you are slightly geeky you may want to download and give it a try.