Vista is extremely bad, because it's pathetic & painfully slow, and that's a fact. Whoever installed Vista all wanted to throw their machines out of the window.
Funny, I didn't have that experience, but I was running Vista on good hardware. I had it on, hmm... an E6600 with 2 gigs of RAM, then 3 gigs of RAM, then reinstalled to go 64-bit and went to 8 gigs of RAM with a 7900 GT, it was tight with 2 gigs of RAM but otherwise worked fine. (Oh, and the first time I tried it, it crashed a lot due to a bad video card, but the card also caused crashes in games in XP. Replacing the card fixed that). I ran the betas on my old 1.9GHz P4 willamette with a 1 gig of RDRAM, an ATI AIW 9800, worked great for a beta that I wasn't using seriously, I presumed the RAM would have been a big issue for serious issue.
My dad had a Vista OEM system from Dell, I still have that box in my closet, it was an E8400 with... I don't remember... how much RAM it originally had. Ran fine. With a few upgrades I later made, I seem to remember that I may have run Windows 10 betas on it before retiring it to the closet.
I even installed it at one point on my laptop, a Dell D610 with a 1.86GHz Pentium M, some ATI graphics that officially had just a little too little memory to be supported, and maxed out RAM (can't remember if that would been 1GB or 2GB?). Ran fine, with Aero glass. What killed that laptop wasn't Vista or 7, it was a loose power jack soldered onto the mobo that I didn't have the skills to fix.
But there was a lot of bad hardware out there. In probably, oh, 2003 or 2004, my aunt got a low end Dell with XP and 128 megs of RAM. Intentionally because the plan was to add more third party RAM. That thing was unusable with the stock 128 megs. And upgrading that thing to Vista would have been an epic fail even after all the RAM added to it.
Vista needed multiple gigs of RAM and GPUs capable of doing the full Aero Glass experience. Most people didn't have that in late 2006.
And actually, this tells you everything about why I'm so angry. Windows 11 is flipping all this around when they allow N4000s and don't allow i7 7700s with 64 gigs of RAM. And then they are going to give some BS story about how recent PCs provide more reliable and consistent performance.
There are some users claimed their 2 years old won't even past the test. So MS just want to upset all those users? I don't think so.
Well, let me ask this - all the off-lease refurb desktops on the market right now are Skylakes or Kaby Lakes. Is it a coincidence that they dropped those systems? I'm sure plenty of people who would otherwise have set up their grandmothers with one of those are now going to be thinking 'grrrr, this thing is going to need replacement in 3 years'.
My guess is that this is intentional because there are a lot of perfectly competent PCs out there, especially desktops (laptops are more likely to fail due to batteries or other issues), that frankly could keep running forever at the current pace of software development. They want to put a nice big fat 2025 end date on those PCs so that people run to the store and buy new (potentially slower) ones. Wouldn't even surprise me if they had nasty little popups starting in 2022 or 2023 about how crappy your PC is and how it's missing all the latest and greatest features because it won't run Windows 11 and you really need to buy a new one. And by 2024 those popups will talk about all the malware your aging PC is about to become vulnerable to...