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Vista was the OS that gave us Windows 7,
it also took away people's beloved Windows XP,
It was a good OS but it was different to what went before,
and for some reason the box shifters thought you could just put it in the stores on "last years" XP Hardware, That meant that most users saw an OS that was Weird and sluggish. It couldn't win,
I ran it on 2GB of ram and a reasonable processor and it was a good OS

I also ran a number of 1GB home systems with a 2GB "server" and made a Learning centre system remote maintenance, updates and a "use it wipe it" auto setup and it worked fine for several years

Never used Vista. Used XP at work and when I retired got W7.

lx07 said:

I know the concepts - just the first PC I bought had 7 and 8 was released about 6 months after so I upgraded. I liked 8 - it looked cleaner and less fussy than 7.

7 was funny with all the little decorations, animations and transparency (I used 5250 at work so didn't follow PC fashion). I can't believe (although if @fdegrove says so it must be true) Vista had even more. Sounds fascinating - I might even find a VM somehow and check it out :)

First "PC" I used was early 80's and used DOS (not the command prompt but the real one). The first computer I bought was a box of bits, You had to assemble it yourself ,the good old ZX80, Experience goes back to the early 70's working with portables that took six to lift

Having used Windows regularly for far longer than the NT-based Windows, I can say unequivocally that Vista would not have been a bad OS, except for the fact that it totally upended the entire peripheral hardware scene, in that it was very, very hard to get drivers written for XP and older versions of Windows to work in Vista. That plus the facts that it was a significant jump in terms of hardware resources required to run Vista over XP, and it fundamentally changed the way people did things in the OS from the way we used to do things in XP, made it seemingly a bad OS when XP was just so much easier to use. But from a security standpoint, XP was like leaving every single security feature off at Fort Knox, while Vista was, at the very least, a lot better at providing at least a modicum of security to the average user with novice computer skills.

Indeed, though, Windows 7 was almost like a bare-bones server edition of the OS compared to Vista and the resource use, and would actually run quite well on machines that ran XP fine but had trouble running Vista. But it was also easily customizable, even if it was not as easy to customize as XP had been in the past. But when Win8 came out I took one look and vowed off of it - I prefer my start menu(es) lean and clean, not looking like an oversized and over-bloated phone interface. And I still do, which is one reason I stuck with WinX when it first started leaking (and then I joined the Insider Program to try out TP2 officially). I could have my start menu in a semblance of what it was like on Win7, and no friggin tiles.

I suppose that part of the reason I didn't try Win8.1 was that, while I knew it was a much better version of the current Windows than 8, I still didn't want to load up a bunch of programs to erase the (essentially adolescent, IMO) UI. But when I jumped on 10, I finally saw a lot of features that were actually introduced in Win8 that I missed because I had skipped it, features that I love in WinX (and initially thought, for some features, at least, that they were new to WinX, and not holdovers from Win8/8.1).

Overall, though, I've found myself relying less and less on 3rd party tools to do things versus my days on XP and 7, and that, more than anything else, has been a blessing.