[Excaliborg]

greetings mr johndowe, i believe i can be of assistance, by your leave of course.

to my knowledge MS have actually extended support for XP for a few more years. as to programs that work with Windows 7, the majority that work with Vista work with Win7, with the exception of daemon tools. you might also experience some issues with older games, mainly games dsigned for XP.

now as to the whole Vista debacle. if the final release of Vista had been as good as the betas or release candidates, all would have ben fine. but MS being a for profit company, they messed it up. as johndowe says, if you have a stable working install of XP, dont change. Vista is a very resourse hungry beastie, so if you dont have the recommended specs, dont waste your time and ignore the minimum requirements. what "minimum requirements" actually mean is the bare minimum to get the os to successfully load without crashing. in my experience i have found Vista to be mostly stable, but there are more than a few gremlins that can hamstring your pc. one thing i can not stress enough is that your pc should always be up to date with the lastest patches and updates and anti-virus, anti-spyware.