Originally Posted by mixture
Yeah, Vista was a ghastly operating system with many issues, one in particular being it ate memory for breakfast.... very much a hog.
SP1 fixed that, and Vista actually remains better in terms of memory usage for machines with not a lot of memory.
The key thing is that computers with 7 were sold with at least 1gb of memory whereas when Vista came out, you could buy a single-core machine with 512mb, which had the Vista "it'll work" sticker on, despite the incredibly crap user experience, made worse by the pre-SP1 memory bugs you mention
That, plus low driver support for the NT6 branch, resulted in the poor impression that persists to this day.