but isnt 7 just a watered down Vista? i dont' know anyone who's especially excited about 7.

No, it's a fixed Vista. I'm genuinely excited about 7. I had the beta and now am running the RC1 on my home desktop. It's fantastically amazing and is what Vista should have been.

I won't go as far as to call it amazing, but yes its definitely a step (or several) in the right direction from Vista. Some of the new APIs are nice to play around with (note verb play) too.

I definitely prefer it to Vista and XP.

I'm only considering Windows 7 as a replacement, to my 2kPro installation on one machine, since everyone is dropping support for 2k. Besides that, I'm keeping XP.

I've been putting off installing XP, but, as you say, 2k support is waning.

Is XP Pro reliable enough to depend on? Any ongoing complaints?

Windows 7, eh? Will it be a thorn initially, as Windows updates all tend to be, or will it be a pleasure to see, as OS-X updates are?

Or shall we wait for version 7.1 as we did v3.1?

wow. that's some tenacity.

XP Pro is reliable, and since we already have it, i intend to keep XP on our production floor indefinitely.

But XP support will soon be disappearing. So, if you haven't gone to XP yet, then don't bother now -- skip XP, hold out another year or so, and just go to 7.

Something to note though, Windows 7 is definitely not faster than XP (not comparable to XP speeds either). It won't run well on XP class hardware. That said, if you still have XP class hardware and don't want to upgrade it, you should be seriously considering running a non-Windows OS at this point.

Yes, but.....

One of the (many) reasons I've avoided "upgrading" from Win2k is that I have many and varied 'customizations' that I've created over the years, to make my system work as I want.

Things as arcane as a CP/M emulator to run my Borland Turbo-Pascal software. And macros in Wordstar-for-Windows (Win3.1) (it really should be dumped though). And many custom batch files..... and my many AutoIt scripts.... Custom Logitech keyboard/mouse, and and and.....

And then there's the software that will need to be reinstalled, and customized (toolbars or custom menus or macros).

It would take forever to update these tools, and then it'd be time to upgrade Windows again. Yuk.

A re-install of Windows is bad enough - 2 to 3 months of use and 'adjustments' - but installing a completely new OS? It's just doesn't sound fun.

What's the way to avoid the above re-install nightmare? Maybe I shouldn't be utilizing the many capabilities of these systems as much as I do...?

I like OS-X but it does seem more difficult to 'customize' to my exact specs. But reinstalls are much cleaner.

I hear tell that the migration from Win2K is still painful, but that from XP onward tends to retain previous preferences, etc. Is this true?

Upgrading from Linux is the "stickiest" of all, and it doesn't really get any more customizable when it comes to OSes.

That said yes, XP (forward only), Vista and Windows 7 do come with migration tools that help move your preferences from the previous OS to the new one. I couldn't tell you how well they work as I never used them myself (I see OS upgrades/reinstalls as a chance to start anew--well, Windows that is) so you may have to do some research on these.