Why do you think Windows Vista was so bad?

I think one main one was IE7 which caused you to get viruses very easily but as an average user I never had any issues with it. I do like win7 more mainly just because I haven't had any problems with it yet.

Vista was rushed out, and a good portion of the technologies that could have made it great was left on the cutting room floor. Instead of being a revolutionary new operating system, it turned out to be a graphical update that couldn't run on a great deal of the integrated graphics controllers on the market at the time. With the popularity of sub-$400 desktop PC's at the time, a large number of systems running older IGP cards were released with Vista pre-installed, leading to a lackluster OS experience. ALso, the early implementation of UAC made me want to punch LCD's. It was a complete mess.

Windows 7 was dealt a far better hand hardware-wise. It's still not what it could be. I really want MS to pick up development on WinFS again. Windows 7 also still suffers from a major graphical bloat problem, and there aren't many options for completely shutting down the eye candy (Although you can go further than you could in Vista.) UAC came along quite well also, becoming less of a nuisance and more of a highly configurable tool. It will be awhile before we really get a feel for Windows 7 in the corporate world, with the snails pace that corporations plan updates, but I feel that Windows 7 will rise to the challenge of replacing XP, and fill XP's shoes well.

Windows Vista is actually a good operating system, i don't have any problems with windows vista. Its a great system and pretty fast.

Just the hardware was not ready for it, Microsoft was not ready for that either.

it was very different from previous versions of windows, and it was the first time they tried it, so your naturally going to have errors, when windows 7 came around they had time to fix them...

Vista, pre-service pack 1, was slow, overburdened, poorly optimized, and used hugely more ram for things like window compositing than XP did. Also, it had a new driver arch for video cards which meant that drivers were going to be buggy for a little while. Also, it spear-headed Microsoft's switch to 64-bit which also meant developing new drivers which meant that even more drivers where going to be buggy. Also, there were some unfortunate bugs like this one that were erroneously attributed to Vista's 'secure path' DRM technology and further soured Windows' users opinion of Vista.

With service pack 1, the very worst of the performance problems in Vista were addressed. Also, with time, 3rd party drivers were improved. Vista SP1 was not a terrible OS at all. It was still Windows (ie not my cup of tea, thank you very much), but it was quite usable. But by then the 'Vista' brand had become known in the popular zeitgeist as synonymous with 'failure' or overwrought design.

Likewise, Windows 7 isn't nearly as good as everyone paints it to be. It's still Windows, it still has a registry, it still doesn't have usable symlinks or a transparent design or a straight-forward boot process or lots of other things that other OSs have, and it's memory footprint is still a lot larger than XP's without any really good reason. But it's still quite usable and the contrast between what everyone thought Vista was and what Windows 7 actually is, without the blogosphere dumping on it, makes Windows 7 look pretty incredible.

Its only had the reputation for being bad because users installed Vista on an under-powered machine with incompatible hardware. For those of us (including me), who used Vista on a machine that was more than capable of running Vista found Vista to be a decent OS.

There were some driver issues and Vista did like to eat a good bit of your RAM but a lot of these issues have been resolved with the service packs MS rolled out.

There's nothing wrong with Vista I got it the day it cameout, and have used it ever sense, and have had no problems what so ever. I hate it when people believe in marketing hype as you don't base an opinion on what everyone else is saying, you base an opinion on trying something first and seeing how it works, and reacts.

Now people complained that their XP programs wouldn't run on Vista, well if they ran it in XP compatibility mode it'd work.

Also every OS crashes, however Vista only crashed on me, when I forgot to clean inside my laptop, which you should do on a weekly basis. So it's not a bad OS I actually love it, I'm more of a Linux user, but Vista shouldn't get all the bad hype it does as it is a good OS, as well as 7.

I, unlike most of the users of this site, happen to LIKE Vista. I thought it was a good OS. The problem stems not from Windows, but the fact that most people were upgrading to Vista on hardware from '01. And even then, most didn't have Vista as bad as I had it: An AMD Sempron 3600+, an ATI Radeon Xpress 1150, and a 64GB hard drive, where 30GB of it was given over to bloatware I couldn't get off. Even still, I look upon Vista as a rock-solid, stable OS. I now run it on a powerful desktop rig, and I'm in love with it. It's a good OS. And in all the long years I had my crappy old Dell, and now this computer, I've only had it bluescreen twice, and that recently, because I had unstable overclocks. I've had a good experience with it. I thought it was good.

Vista was only "so bad" because the media told you it was bad. Actually, it was a decent OS which had a few compatibility problems as it was a major change from XP. If 7 had come out straight after XP, it would have had all the same problems (except perhaps performance would be a little better as they had more time - Vista was rushed a bit). But I've used Vista and 7 and I actually prefer Vista - sure, 7 uses less resources, but Vista has Windows Calendar, a decent mail client (no, Live Mail doesn't work well at all unless you use hotmail)... and it didn't have the "Libraries" nonsense. Also in Vista, My Pictures etc dropped the "My" prefix (yay!) but this is back in 7, but only sometimes (My Pictures, My Documents, Downloads (?), Contacts (?) ...) and even worse, at the filesystem level these are still called "Pictures", not "My Pictures" etc.

Apologies for getting a bit geeky and hating Windows 7 a bit there but just my thoughts – Aero Snap is pretty good though and the new taskbar is pretty good so 7 isn't bad either.

BTW, I'm a mac user and use Snow Leopard – just sharing my thoughts of my old Vista PC (then it was Windows 7 for a few weeks) before I got my mac :D