An additional issue - Hardware Driver support

The upgrade train is painful (in my case). With Vista I lost the driver support (manufacturer) for my SCSI interface card... thus my scanner, AV interface card, and my USB slide scanner; all in one fell swoop! I've kept a copy of WinXP on the system just to retain support for these devices (dual boot). Win7 is at least better (not perfect) at driver support. If it worked in Vista it'll likely work in Win7.

The same could be said of some software distributions.

Sure, I could upgrade my hardware /software. Why should I when it functions and does what I need?

All this pain just to run another operating system? .