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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

That kind of reminds me of the Stockholm syndrome a bit. Vista was very disappointing, because users expected something good after XP, and it wasn't. By the time Windows 7 showed up, users were even more tired of XP than they were when Vista launched, and they couldn't wait for a "decent" alternative. After the low standard that Vista set, they were happy that Windows 7 was at least as good as XP or better.

But now people are not tired of Windows 7, and some just upgraded to it a year or two ago. Add that to the fact that it makes the desktop experience very confusing, and I don't see Windows 8 being very successful.

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I think people are forgetting the huge performance slowdown with Vista on some hardware. This is the reason I and my colleagues said that it sucked, at the time. Yes, SP1 made it better and the "it sucked" labeled was withdrawn.

This. Microsoft made the boneheaded move of allowing retailers to sell machines that had 1GB of RAM installed with Vista. Could they run it? Sure. Could they run it well? Absolutely not. Because of this, my wife (who made the mistake of letting her "just tech smart enough to be dangerous" sister accompany her to the store) bought a Vista machine that has forever made her swear off "PC's". Now she's a dedicated Mac fan.

I never used Vista much(not a regular Windows user as such), but another reason why people might hated Vista with such passion was perhaps that most of the hardware people had was not sufficient for it. At least that was one major reason among many people I knew. Windows XP ran just fine even on 128MB RAM and Pentium III processor, however Vista required around 2GB for some decent performance. There were many people using considerably old boxes.

Yes, and experience is in the details. The difference between Vista and 7 is not prominent, but it is big.

Having used Vista and 7 side by side (test environment for a customer) I can say that you're spot on. It's many small things but they add up quickly. One example: network adapter settings are completely misnamed in Vista, a major pain to find them.

You probably haven't really seen the worse of Vista, to say that.

My experience, that is matched by some other people around me, is that the difference is that 7 works pretty much out of the box, while Vista could make your computer unusable.

I agree.

I've been using OSX for about 3 years now. I just recently built and set up a PC with Windows 7 in the past 3-4 months. I am in absolutely no hurry to upgrade barring some huge technological innovation, which I have no reason to believe will be coming from Windows 8.

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