I never understood people's love for Windows XP. It maybe started to get good after a few service packs but I found it to be unstable and prone to slowing down

I never understood people's love for Windows XP. It maybe started to get good after a few service packs but I found it to be unstable and prone to slowing down after a short while of use even into SP2. Whatever initial criticisms of XP that had come out were probably justified (It definitely was and still is an ugly operating system). I don't agree with the author's point that people automatically hate whatever windows version come next. It just seems that way because we haven't had a good windows since 98. The only reason why windows 7 actually turned out to be a decent operating system is because it needed to be, the competition(OSX, linux) was gaining ground under XP primarily because of how bad it was. Sure I imagine that the age of XP had something to do with it but I remember installing linux back in 2004/2005 after one to many blue screens with XP and not looking back until windows 7.