Yeah, Vista had two big issues that had both been mostly resolved by the time 7 was released: 1) Driver support was poor, and 2) A bunch of low end computers with "Vista Capable" stickers that really meant "It should boot but it's going to be awful."

IIRC Microsoft was pressured by OEMs into making a lower tier of Vista qualified hardware even though they knew it really required more than that to work acceptably well.

I never personally owned or used a Vista machine, but my office has a couple of them plugged in for a showroom area where they cycle powerpoint slides, and oh my god is it painful if you ever have to touch them. IIRC they've got 512 MB of RAM, and some of that is being shared with the iGPU. It's not pretty.

I used two sets of Vista machine, the 32-bit machines were almost all terribly slow, the 64-bit machines were surprisingly capable. So much so, that I could use a Vista 64-bit machine as an alternative to Windows 7 if it were still supported. The machines sold as Vista-capable weren't all that great with XP, but better, so were even under-powered for the previous generation. Vista leaned a lot more heavily on disk I/O that its predecessors, so turning off Windows Search, and a few other things I forget made it tolerable to use. It must have been about that time that all of Microsoft's developers got SSDs on their desk (I'm only half joking).

I remember installing Windows 95, from floppy disks back in 1996 or so. The system requirements on the box said 4MB of RAM. And it was true, Windows would run with 4MB. In the fine print, the box also said if you wanted to do anything besides play solitaire, like word processing, 8 was recommended.

So it's been going on a long time, the lowball estimate of systems requirements to get you to buy the product, then the real cost after you've already installed it. 4MB is a rounding error these days, back then it was at least a couple hundred dollars.

Vista being painfully slow was not limited to low-end machines. I had a fairly powerful (8GB+ RAM, new i5, etc.) gaming rig when it came out, and everything was slow on it: I'd click something in the interface and have to wait 5+ seconds for it to respond, Windows Explorer would crash randomly, etc. Even booting up seemed to take forever. Upgrading to Windows 7 fixed all such issues, and I still have the machine to this day, which I've kept with Windows 7 (although I upgraded the GPU).

Damn.

512MB wasn't even enough for my WinXP box because the softeware apart from the OS became more demanding with time.