True, I never quite understood why people seem to hate Vista but love 7.
I have a laptop with Vista (and a recent SP) and 7 on my desktop. Besides a few UI differences I find it hard to tell them apart at all.
Most of the changes between XP and Vista that I disliked on Vista seem to have persisted unchanged in 7. I find network configuration much more confusing on Vista and 7 than on XP for example.
Perhaps earlier versions of Vista did have issues with memory management but as far as I can tell they have been improved by recent service packs.
I think it's due to poor management of the product and its release.
From my experience, Vista was hated due to very poor driver support, the ever-annoying UAC, and the fact that the new Aero UI (along with misc. other system services) took a significant toll on system resources.
At least the first 2 issues were both largely resolved via service packs, which is why you're probably not suffering much from those problems. The last issue was jointly resolved through some refinement of Aero, and the fact that the marginal resource cost became less significant once more powerful systems became available at cheaper costs.
The crux of the problem though, is that many people found under Vista that many of their devices quit working, their PC was slower, and they were getting pop-ups from UAC for basically everything that they clicked on.
Vista wasn't terrible per se, but it's negatives outweighed the positives for many people, and when you boil that result down to a binary value representing whether you think it was "good" or "bad", then the result is going to be "bad".
I have a laptop with Vista (and a recent SP) and 7 on my desktop. Besides a few UI differences I find it hard to tell them apart at all.
Most of the changes between XP and Vista that I disliked on Vista seem to have persisted unchanged in 7. I find network configuration much more confusing on Vista and 7 than on XP for example.
Perhaps earlier versions of Vista did have issues with memory management but as far as I can tell they have been improved by recent service packs.