That holds for major upgrades (e.g XP → Vista), but those didn’t used to just happen on their own. In the time frame my previous post was speaking of, one still

That holds for major upgrades (e.g XP → Vista), but those didn’t used to just happen on their own. In the time frame my previous post was speaking of, one still had to buy major upgrades, and updates within the same version rarely brought significant UI changes. So in reality, there wasn’t much valid reason for there to be for example XP and 7 machines still running initial releases or early service packs for years on end (which was shockingly common). Most of the reason people had for avoiding minor updates is that they just found them annoying. Now today of course things are quite different and it’s not unusual for a routine Windows update to turn things upside down. Users are more justified in update-averseness than they were 15-20 years ago, except of course now that brings much greater risk of getting pwned than it did back then.