To be fair, Vista did have a lot of good things going for it. Microsoft's first attempt to globally use clean modular processing and protected I/O (something real OS platforms like linux have emphasized for many years). New and Improved Registry and driver models which were surprisingly actually both new and improved. I approve of the inclusion of new gimmicks like WEI which are intended to help idiot users use their computers properly.
I disapprove of Microsoft's sudden realization that they should act on 3D. Hey look, WinXP looks exactly the same as it did 5 years ago, that's not right because we made all those service packs, so let's make the new one look really fancy regardless of the performance hit. (Y'know, some of us feel that our hardware would be better dedicated to running our programs than more useless eye-candy in our OS.)
I disapprove of the 26,383,773,304 background running processes and all the other bloat. You can't open Notepad with less than 8GB RAM unless you enable swapfile?
I disapprove of the Microsoft=Adminstrator and User=Subadministrator hierarchy.
Win7 has sandboxed much more (though not all) of the system. It's more streamlined and lightweight but still unacceptable. At least Microsoft actually implemented the System Nag in a decent way that doesn't make you want to punch your computer. By the time they've pushed out Win8 it should be almost as good as linux was a few years ago. Well worth paying another $250-$500 for a Genuine copy.
I actually like os eyecandy, but you can make xp look and work exactly like vista, and add things like the real vista sidebar/directx10 to it with things like alky for windows as well, and it's basically Vista, but much better and without all the early driver problems Vista had.
Windows 7 seems exactly like Vista to me, the only difference is that it has a much better driver/compatibility solved now.
If you had an nvidia chipset, your computer was basically impossible to upgrade to Vista early on, which is where much of the really bad rep came from I think.
It's not actually as resource hungry as people say it is. I was running Vista on c2d's with 2 or 3gigs, once the drivers got sorted out, and playing fps's with little or no difference from my xp systems that had more power and more ram.
Windows was always disastrous when it first gets released, and requires tons of updates to make it work correctly. It happened with 95, xp, me, and vista. It always takes the second versions, 98 second edition, xp sp2 or sp3, and windows7 to make the system actually usuable. Then no one remembers how horrible the system was to begin with, and everyone complains when the next one comes out like it's so bad.
And yeah I used ME too, and it wasn't horrible when it was initially installed. It actually fixed a lot of driver problems that 98 had with several of my system, and in it's basic configuration worked pretty smoothly. The problem I had with it was was when you started to actually work and add stuff to it that it would easily get, I don't know, corrupted or something, and stuff would start going wrong with it. The reason why ME is always remembered as such a disaster is that it never really got a service pack, and xp superseded it shortly after its release.
The thing that made everyone really pissed off with Vista I think was that Microsoft had this huge campaign of having a giant beta where everyone was supposed to give their suggestions and help improve the system and make it bulletproof. But Microsoft never seemed to actually listen to any of the suggestions, or complaints, especially from some very famous testers like Chris Pirillo, who made a huge stink.
