I've never been a fan of MACs - but to their defense, they are excellent working machines - my late uncle used them in his sign business and swore by them.
I grew up with DOS 3.2 (the dark ages) and graduated to Windows 3.0, 3.1, Win 98. I skipped over the Win2000 and Millennium versions and went to XP and stayed with that for 8 years with no problems at all. I found XP to be a very stable OS. I still use a laptop XP machine when I travel, and it works out just fine for me.
My only reason to move to Windows 7 was when my XP machine (pressing 9 years of age) started giving me the BSOD treatment almost daily ... it was the mother board that was crapping out ... Fortunately, I had forseen the problems coming and bought an external 1.0 TB drive and moved all my files and applications there for a backup plan. Finally, the XP machine gave up the ghost ... repairing it was just not worth it and I don't like buying used stuff, so I ordered a new Dell Win 7 machine.
(I did not even think about getting Vista - glad I bypassed that one, for sure)
The period of adjustment from XP to Win7 has been difficult at times. Win 7 likes to store things where it wants, not where you think it should have gone, but I've got that almost figured out and can deal with it finally. There are still some files that I haven't been able to find though.
Of course Win7 came with IE as its default browser ... that was the first thing I did to this new machine: installed Firefox and changed all my browser default settings to steer completely away from IE - but others swear by IE and other browsers. I retain an older version of IE for one site that I must visit twice a year - other than that I have zero use for IE and will stick with Firefox.
I just started using Foxit and quite pleased with what it can do. For my virtual music scores (public domain organ music) I an actually add a note to the first page of the music indicating what date I last played the piece for a church service, and/or add registration comments. Pretty nifty thing ... gotta watch out when installing it to make sure it doesn't install all the Yahoo add-ons ... it did add a couple icons at the top of the page though, one of them being a live radio station streaming.
. . . I've said this before but the main thing that gets up my nose is the continual "you have updates" I don't recall seeing any differences after updates they claim most are security issues, I'm sure a decent programmer should be able to write code that isn't so susceptible to security breaches.
I hear you on that ... but many of those changes cannot be foreseen in advance ... the hackers and spammers are always creating new ways to cause trouble, and it seems each week they come up with something new that the programmers haven't seen before and then need to write new code to stop/correct it. Sad to say, but it's always going to be like that Mike; there is no 'crystal ball' to determine what the hackers are going to try next.
Kh ♫