Windows 10: Windows 7 more reliable than 10 if you want to avoid hangs & crashes

That's not the way I remember it at all. Yes, there were complaints about the activation (complaints which are still valid today, for XP and all versions of Windows since), and the price, but those things have nothing to do with the performance of the OS. I started using XP in early 2002 (pre-service pack), and it worked beautifully from day one. I don't remember a lot of performance-related complaints from people, certainly nothing like with Windows Me and Vista. The main early complaints were with regard to incompatibility with certain older hardware peripherals at the time (printers, scanners, etc.)

I stayed with XP as my main OS until about a week ago (I eventually added Windows 7 along with it in a dual boot configuration, but I rarely used it), so I used it daily for 13 years (I didn't look forward to downgrading to a newer version of Windows, and I'd still much rather be running XP than anything else, but my new hardware has no XP drivers, and I also now have 8 GB of RAM, half of which would be ignored by XP).

I never noticed any performance differences whatsoever in any of the service packs, aside from the "TCP/IP Limit" thing that came along with SP2 that ruined the performance of peer-to-peer file sharing applications at the time (they triggered an EventID 4226 due to exceeding the new limit of 10 for half-open connections), which was promptly and perfectly patched by "LvlLord", allowing you to set the limit as high as you wanted.