Window 7 was the best decision MS made this decade. It doesn't hog memory like Vista did (with Game Booster running, it takes up only about 400MB of RAM in the background of my PC as opposed to Vista's atrocious 1GB). It was a vast improvement over Vista and pushes 64-bit processing, and add in higher RAM allowances and a few nifty things like the slice tool and rotating background selection and you have a fairly good OS. Also, DX11 support.
Give up on XP already - it's a decade old and it's infrastructure was never built to be secure on the internet, which is why it relied so heavily on antiviruses. Hell, Win7 is <url=http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10444561-245.html>more heavily secured than even Macs.
Halvar Flake, head of research and CEO of Zynamics: "General state of affairs: Vista/Win7 has more extensive countermeasures against attacks and a codebase with presumably fewer security issues.
Rich Mogull, CEO, Securosis: Microsoft has done more in terms of its inherent security features than Apple has in the operating system.
Charlie Miller, a principal analyst at consultancy Independent Security Evaluators: Technologically speaking, PCs are a little more secure than Macs. Macs have a larger attack surface out of the box (Flash, Java, support for a million file formats, etc.) and lack some anti-exploitation technologies found in PCs like full ASLR [Address Space Layout Randomization]. This means Macs have more vulnerabilities and it's easier to turn a vulnerability into an exploit on the platform.
Tyler Reguly, senior security research engineer, nCircle: If you believe the hype and the flashy commercials the answer would be Mac. But if you take a look at the two platforms, and the mindsets of the companies behind them then the PC wins hands down. If you compare Windows 7 to Snow Leopard, then the simple winner is Windows 7. Microsoft brought in teams of security professionals to look at their code and find problems leading to a more secure product while Apple is often criticized for ignoring issues.
And what games aren't you guys able to play on Win7? It has excellent backward compatibility and there's a thing called DOSBOX.
