Especially when W7 wasn't exactly expensive and well worth the money :P
Printable View
I found Vista pretty decent, a good advance from XP at least. It had so many problems at the start of its life, but the competition weren't any better. Vista didn't wake up from sleep mode and Snow Leopard (Leopard Service Pack 1) deleted personal data if logged in on a Guest Account. Both as hopeless as each other :P I updated a Vista machine which had never touched the internet in its life time. Each update improved it by quite a large margin, particularly the SP updates.
It's certainly my view each Windows OS is better than the previous one (As it should be). Windows Vista was undoubtedly better than Windows XP. It wasn't the perfect OS, I had a few issues with it, all of which were resolved on Windows 7 but it was by no means unusable. The vast majority of complaints about Windows Vista were baseless and from hear-say/the media. I've no time for anyone who's installed Windows XP over Windows Vista.
XP was damn good... Vista was OK. I never used to hate it, it was a good OS. Then I used 7. WOW.
The issue with Vista was the hardware vendors not conforming to Microsoft's guidelines for writing drivers for the new OS. Many of them simply ported the XP drivers only, then it made Vista and MS look bad when things didn't work.
I have no idea where the Vista love has come from and tbh it's the first I've seen on the internet. Windows Vista is like Windows 7 beta, its largely the same just more broken and doesn't work as well. I wasn't willing to stick with it for years while they made it usable and stuck with XP until 7 came out.