What version of Windows is the best for me to use?

I am often asked by my customers, "What Operating System is the best? Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7?"

The answer as always is, It depends on what you need.

Windows XP is by far the most tweaked and quite probably more stable for it. You can use it for practically anything and it will run. The major problem there is you need to install drivers for everything yourself. Most programs have an automatic driver installation however some do not.

Windows Vista/Mohave is just a stepping stone to Windows 7. I view it as the most unstable of the three Operating systems. If you have hardware incompatiblities you can lose all of windows in one fell swoop. Once I had only an arrow on a black screen when Windows Explorer would not load. This occurred three times when I owned Vista. There were a couple of other things that occurred but most of it was due to hardware problems. The black screen was my hard drive giving an error when the computer started up where Vista loaded before the driver finished loading. This caused the bootup to skip running windows explorer. An interesting timing issue there! Another problem seems be the User Account Control Interface which always pops up asking for permission to do this or that or whatever item you clicked on.

Now I have Windows 7. I find the network capabilities and sharing in Windows 7 the best of the three. Overall Windows 7 wins hands down for Organization and usability. It has some other nice features such as the library feature. I find it a huge improvement in Windows. I love the Shake feature where if you have several windows open, you can click the title bar and shake the window around so it will minimize all other windows.  Snap is another feature to use for viewing documents side by side.  One drawback for Windows 7 is if you use lower screen resolutions you will be missing dialog box buttons in many cases. It also causes the same problem on notebooks with limited resolution such as 1024x600. Always make sure the display supports 1024x768.

For my money Windows 7 is the top pick for usability with XP running a close 2nd because of all the software that is compatible with the OS.