Another possible reason is better driver support for newer equipment on Vista and 7?
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Vista Basic performed horribly on my laptop, it was slower than an elephant with its legs tied together with concrete rope. Windows 7 was like a dream, XP (what I have now) is kind of hit and miss but it seems good atm! So yeah, I find on lower end hardware Vista sucks up resources like hell but on higher end hardware the OS makes little difference either way.
Look, the main reason I found Vista better was I needed a better PC to run it, to be totally honest. Our XP PC (running a Pentium 4, 7600GS, and 1.5Gb of RAM) can run The Sims 3 at virtually the same settings as my Vista laptop (running an AMD Athlon X2 dual core, HD 4530 and 3Gb of RAM).
Vista is too resource-intensive.
No it isn't, what people don't understand is Vista populates the RAM with programs that aren't running that you use frequently, when it needs the RAM it clears it, it LOOKS resource intensive, but this speeds it up considerably.
And you cannot compare a desktop to a laptop (especially with an AMD x2)
Fair enough if you like XP better but you cannot use the performance excuse :P
I can use the performance excuse when a PC performs the same as one that has nearly double the specs.
get better hardware.