As an XP user, I don't really care about those "features" or whatever I am missing. I am just happy to be able to surf the internet using IE6 and use MS Office for my everyday work. I occasionally play games on FaceBook and use Twitter to tell friends about what I am doing....

- average user -

That was probably accurate until you got to Twitter. The average user probably isn't on Twitter (based on recent Twitter surveys that were posted on HN).

I think by now XP users are used to not having much fun. Your operating system is ten years old! The average hard drive was 40GB when it was released!

If you measure fun as negative frustration, I had a lot more fun with XP than I ever have had with Windows 7. XP was so familiar it melted into the background, and incompatibilities were non-existent. Windows 7 has moved everything around and introduced nothing of value to me personally - my preference would be for XP shell, control panel layout etc. with the Windows 7 kernel and system libraries.

In some ways that's true. Win XP is missing several features.

On the other hand I'd wager that XP has broader support for any driver or program in existence than any other version of any other OS. That's always nice.

As we're seeing, though, that's going to start changing real soon.

For old hardware Linux is probably a better bet. But Windows supports some stuff exclusively, that's right.

I'm sorry, but it is not 10 years old. The original release of Windows XP was late 2001 (9 years ago). Most people are running Service Pack 2 (6 years ago) or Service Pack 3 (2 years ago).

I currently have no reason to switch to Windows 7, but if I do I really really hope I can change the shell to something approximating Windows 2000 and lacking the transparency and pseudo-Dock that they have going.

Articles such as these illustrate why I think humankind has hope. Wresting signal from noise. The triumph of will and intellect over chaos.

I think vendors should not hold back, but start selling those 4k disks now. So XP users won't buy them, if they know what they're doing...

But it might be a compelling reason for people to upgrade their OS, if disks for their OS are smaller and/or more expensive than the new 4k ones.

Quote about current situation:

Typical consumer grade hard drives have a target of one unreadable bit for every 10^14 read from disk (10^14 bits is about 12 TB, so if you have six 2 TB disks in an array, that array probably has an error on it);

That's an error unrecoverable by the hardware, passed to the system software - if it hits an encrypted or compressed archive, with no ECC itself, the whole bundle of data is corrupted. Photos, music, movies, etc. probably fare better.

The article does not specify if the 10^14 number is going up in the new hardware. If not ...

My take on this when a friend mentioned it was: I don't need a new hard drive to run XP, and I mainly use external USB drives anyway.