I hate Vista. It is an evil OS and should be forgotten.

first thing i did to the laptops i bought my parents.... buy Win7 Upgrades.. Wipe Win Vista, Wipe the restore partitions and install fresh Windows 7,.

ha ha always makes me laugh when I hear all the Vista haters.

Funny how I run it on 3 desktops and 2 laptops both 32bit and 64bit. No problems at all and very fast.

I find when you dig deeper the critics either ran early versions on old hardware with old programs or just didn't learn how to tune it correctly.

In fact 7 is Vista but with the tuning. It also helps that I can install Vista on any number of computers completely free but that's another matter.

Whenever I install Vista I get all the updates before installing anything else, turn off indexing, turn off UAC then do regular runs with Ccleaner. It flies and is totally reliable.

But go on hating if you want it's your pc and your money.....

I think the fact that you can install Vista on any number of computers completely free and are willing to spend a bunch of time tuning it has something to do with your opinion of it

Most of us "Vista haters" had to pay for it and it shows up online on Amazon for a similar price as Windows 7...

No gaming benefits like DX 10 and 11? Vista is also much faster and more responsive than XP. Issues that would require an OS reinstall or sever registry fixing in XP could be fixed easily in Vista.

7 uses less RAM, starts/shuts off quicker than Vista, though file transfers from HDD to HDD are far slower. Win 7 will also randomly "forgets" icons for shortcuts, such as Lock On, Rise of Flight ect. Not a big issue but it can get ugly to see your desktop filled with icons the look the same.

Overall I prefer 7 to Vista, though Vista was superior in some ways. XP? That is a buggy unstable BSOD happy turd that should be dumped for Vista/7 at any given chance. Going from 98 to XP produced many issues as well, where as XP to Vista 64bit was a smooth transition. All of my programs worked.

Just make sure you get a 64bit version of Win 7.

My thoughts exactly. Most either don't remember what it was like when XP came out, or weren't around to have to worry about it. Remember when SP1 came out? Most people didn't even know what a firewall WAS much less why it was keeping so much software from working. LOL
Also, going from 98 to XP and having it run well meant you needed almost 10 times the memory, which for many people meant a new pc. That wasn't nearly as bad when going from XP to Vista.
The speed increase between Vista and 7 isn't noticeable, as is the memory use improvement. I've run both on my netbook just fine. Of course, with Win7 we got the dumbed down Windows Live suite, the annoying Libraries and Homegroups.
I'm fine with W7, it's just laughable when people think it's much more than Vista. It's Vista with a couple of years of patching, they're practically the same.

I remember a couple of the first computers I worked on that were brand new Vista machines and so slow it was painful. They were Gateways with 512Mb of memory.

Microsoft did not care, Gateway did not care.

I will never forget that they had 3.4Ghz Pentium 4 Prescotts, 2 sticks of 256Mb DDR2 memory. One little fan on the CPU heatsink and the other fan was in the PSU.

I put in 2Gb of memory in each and then they were tolerable. I could have fixed them for about the same price with a clean install of XP, but did not want to chase drivers and the owners did not want to spring for OEM copies of XP, which would have cost about the same.

Still hate Vista, probably for the reason that Microsoft let vendors sell computers with that little RAM knowing that it was going to be the worst experience speed wise for the owner.

Sounds like some people had better luck with Vista than I did, probably due to hardware... good to know though.

With Win 7 I've not had any problems with icons on the desktop but I did notice the slow file copy/move but long ago found a good utility to workaround that which is one of the first things I re-install after each Win 7 OS wipe: TeraCopy free for personal use and makes file copy/moves fly.

The OP asked about today moving from XP to Vista or Win7, and that is the context of my answers above, I think anyone upgrading from XP to Vista today is wasting their time and money on an inferior product IMHO Win 7 at this point is a nobrainer.

Eye opening to hear good Vista experiences which is definitely different from mine and most people experiences I've discussed this with in the past I work in IT though and we tend to be a opinionated/judgemental bunch when it comes to OS'es

Can't blame MS for that, they don't control how the pc's are built. Most of those just came with an upgrade code to go to Vista. The Gateway I bought right after vista came out had 3GB's. The netbook I ran it on had 2 GB's and was fine. Same type of thing happened when XP came out and people thought they could save money and just get away with 64KB of memory like with 98. Ran like a slideshow. LOL Can't blame MS for people being ignorant of recommended specs that were released before the OS even came out.
I remember throwing away a scanner and a printer that were barely 2 years old when I switched to XP, just no drivers. Didn't have that issue with Vista, it was a little better prepared at launch. I know there were issues for some though, that comes with any change. You can't cover it all, especially the older hardware.

Kludger, I know what you mean. In a business environment, with specialized software and expensive hardware that needs to last until it's no longer a deduction, an OS change is always going to be hard. If Win7 had come out and no Vista at all, the situation would probably still be the same. Most businesses probably still use XP due to the expense of licensing, hardware upgrades etc. It's not cheap to make a change like that, in addition to being sure all necessary software and hardware is prepared for it.

it wasnt just windows vista... gateway also bombarded the harddisk, startup services, and ram with proprietary gateway and 3rd party bloatware.

Vista had a Hard enough time running on 2 GB, now drop it to 512, dedicate 64MB of it to VRAM, another 16MB to the Boot Loader/Pre-Install Environment and try to run the O/S, then add in the bloatware and crap.