[citation][nom]waethorn[/nom]Actually, when Vista came out, I never had any problems with it. People said it was slow, but I never found it slower than XP, and they said it was annoying, yet it follows the security practises of any current OS, except that Vista only allows admins to install software, which is the way it should be IMO (users should NOT be allowed to install software into their own profile folder). Not only that, but the deployment of Vista is so much easier and more efficient than XP/2000. The deployment tools are awesome, and the way that Microsoft configured the install is by setting up the folder structure and just backing up a hard drive into a compressed file - the same way any IT person will clone a PC. This is why Vista/7/8 all install in under 15 minutes flat. It just extracts a pre-installed image from the disc.Likewise, when ME came out, I jumped on it right away. I found audio was far more efficient in ME because my sound card vendor actually produced proper WDM drivers for it. Gaming framerates improved....because of audio. Also, using ANYTHING with 1394 (USB 2.0 wasn't out yet) connections meant that it ran like crap if you were using 98, since 98 didn't support OHCI 1394 out of the box. ME had support included, so you just popped a 1394 card in, booted up Windows ME and it loaded the drivers automatically. Plug a 1394 hard drive in, and you're laughing. I had a 1394 hard drive, a DVD burner, and a camcorder at the time and did digital video editing on the machine. It was usable with ME. Not so with 98SE.[/citation]
I had horrible stability, performance, and driver issues with Vista when it was new. It was far slower than XP, crashed even more often, and couldn't work with a large portion of my hardware (poor printer). I had no problem with its extra security features such as UAC and I appreciated them, unlike other people who bashed it just because they were too lazy to be more proactive in protecting their computer from security threats. Now ME, I also had... I did not have much trouble with it either. Vista, however, was much worse. 7 solved most of the problems, but that printer still only worked with my older XP laptop up until it broke down. I did not like any of the 98s and I skipped them... I went strait from 95 to ME and 2000 on a few machines.
Also, a lesson learned. Just because a computer has a sticker that says Windows Vista Ready does not mean that it is ready for Windows Vista. The stickers were lies and did not change how Vista did not like 1GB of RAM and hated a mere 512MB.
Once Vista matured a little and after 7 had launched, Vista, as an OS, seemed much more stable and driver support problems were almost completely a thing of the past. It was also a little faster, although it is still probably MS's heaviest consumer OS ever. With SP2, it really is a decent OS, albeit still very heavy on resource usage. As you get newer and faster hardware, differences in performance between OSs get less noticeable, so the only serious issue that I'd still have with it is its obnoxiously large RAM usage.