> Everyone has different experience.

Yeah, I'm acutely reminded of this every time someone brings up Windows 7's predecessor. Apparently I'm the only person who ever lived on this planet who had absolutely zero problems with Windows Vista, and even liked it quite a bit.

Nah, aside from some minor annoyances that ended up getting polished in updates I didn't have any issues with it either. When it came out I wasn't making much money so I wasn't running top of the line hardware by any means. Still, it ran OK on my PC at the time (Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM, and some low-ish end nVidia GPU). Still, even my budget Newegg Special was better than the real dogs some people were buying at the time (or some of the older computers they were trying to upgrade).

Vista seemed like it was built to leverage the current hardware of the time rather than run nicely on weaker systems that companies were still selling because they could passably run WinXP (slow CPUs, 256-512MB RAM, integrated GPU). It made sense because both OSX and Linux were capable of GPU acceleration of desktop windowing, aggressive use of caching things in RAM, etc. but too many users were still purchasing the absolute cheapest thing they could find that would still boot.

Then you had all of the hardware issues caused by companies not bothering to write new drivers for old peripherals and the software issues from applications that just assumed you were running as root/admin. I didn't have any old scanners or printers or anything that needed driver updates and very few of my important applications weren't updated to work under the new UAC setup.

In many ways, I feel like most of Vista's problems came from 98SE and then XP being "good enough" for so long that a lot of companies and users weren't used to needing to choose software and hardware more carefully.

The biggest problem with Vista for most people was that it was sold on computers without enough RAM. We have a couple in our office (thankfully not used regularly) where it's 1 GB and the integrated GPU borrows a quarter of it for VRAM.

Windows Vista on 768 MB of memory is not a happy thing.

I can imagine it. I guess the experience is sort of like the one I had with a cheap Android smartphone, where the hardware was too weak to handle the OS itself (and if you tried to connect to the Internet, you basically had to pull the battery out because it went totally unresponsive).

I'm not sure why such things happen. Selling a product where the hardware is below minimum reasonable specs for the software it needs should be banned, or something.

I didn't have any problem with Vista either and I feel your pain, most people I speak with seems to love to hate Vista.

I also have a similar feeling when somebody tells me that Windows 8 was only good for touch devices (I enjoyed it in a HP 8710w and didn't miss the touchscreen at all)

My impression of Windows 8 (for most use cases at least) has always been that it's essentially Win7 with the beginnings of some "transitional" stuff tacked on. Still, they are mostly unobtrusive unless you never moved away from the old "drill down through menus" method of launching programs from the Start menu. Vista introduced a search function (to finally catch up with OSX's Spotlight) that made finding and opening programs or files much faster. Then 7 combined the quick launch bar and the taskbar to include pinning common apps to the bottom of your screen (more like the OSX dock). So between launching 90% of your programs from the taskbar and search&query for the rest, the Start menu was mostly legacy...

...but with Win8 I've learned just how many people never stopped doing things the old way. Does a full-screen Start make sense? Not particularly. But if you're just hitting the Windows key and typing the name of what you're looking for, you only see it for a few seconds. And while you're looking at the search results, you aren't really working actively on what's in your other running apps. Otherwise, you never really see it if you don't want to use it.

I'm glad 10 has shrunk Start back down because my minor complaint has always been that the full screen Start was just a little "jarring" but that's about it. If nothing else, it will make the old school Start menu die hards (read: the faculty I deal with) happier I guess.

> But if you're just hitting the Windows key and typing the name of what you're looking for, you only see it for a few seconds.

Which I'm probably not doing if I'm going from one program with a WIMP-optimized interface to another program with a WIMP-optimized interface; context-switching to keyboard-driven mode is a bigger UX loss than the start screen is there.

If you had a powerhouse computer it was fine. The midrange laptop I had at the time was not happy with it. It also broke compatibility with most of the games I had.

Make that two persons, I remember that it was quite ok on my machine.

Absolutely the only one issue I had with Vista was that system file copying went a little slow, and you could get 2x+ speedups by just using Total Commander instead. Apart from that, I had pretty much problem-free experience with Vista.