Heck, I thought Vista was better than XP. I never had a problem with it, although I am a gamer so the hardware requirements were nothing to me.
Windows 7 is considerably lighter than Vista. I don't remember how big the initial installation was, but my HTPC running 7 currently only has 16GB used up on the OS hard drive and that's
with all the programs I need installed (all the movies, TV episodes, recordings, etc. are on a different HDD). 7 ran smoothly with the initial 1GB of memory I put in it, although it now has 2GB for HD playback purposes.
Even if you're going from XP to 7 and you find yourself unable to adjust to the new UI, you can just turn on XP mode. It'll let you use XP inside of Windows 7 as a virtual PC. If you're gonna do that, there's no real point to upgrading at all though. -_-
Just get it. If you're a college student, you can get
a copy for $30.
Also:
this.