I'm sure Windows 7 will do fine. Microsoft has a captive market for the most part. Eventually these XP machines will need to be replaced and it's very unlikel

I'm sure Windows 7 will do fine. Microsoft has a captive market for the most part. Eventually these XP machines will need to be replaced and it's very unlikely a large number of those people who have been happy with a ~10 year old OS will suddenly become interested in the virtues of OSX or Linux. Linux on netbooks was a threat to Microsoft briefly but it was never capitalized on. Most of the Linux distributions shipped on netbooks are really subpar. Hopefully ChromeOS, Moblin, and Android can change that. HP's Linux UI is quite nice also. The big question is how hard they'll push this when Microsoft is offering Windows 7 for netbooks so cheaply to OEMs.