Comment by theandrewbailey
9 hours ago
> This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it.
I remember buying one of the first AMD Turion X2 laptops with an ATI GPU (Acer Ferrari 5000?). Initially came with XP, but I installed Vista 64-bit on it (courtesy of my college's MSDN subscriptions) several months after release. XP BSODed about once per month under normal use, but with Vista, it never did. Everything I tried to use it with worked, it was fast enough and looked great! (The start menu's search bar was a killer feature for me! back when Windows search worked...) My college issued everyone Thinkpads, and when they had a Vista-based image, I got it, and my experience with Vista on that was likewise.
I built a gaming desktop a while later and put Vista on it, and it had occasional BSODs. I also suspect the Nvidia drivers, but I recall that stability improved with Windows 7.
For those reasons, I seem to be 1 of about 3 people on earth that has a mildly positive opinion about Windows Vista.
That's fair, and I suspect that if I either A) had a different hardware configuration at the time or B) had tried Vista about a year later than I did, I may have ended up with an entirely different opinion of it.