Reading that both made me dumber just by its existence and made me throw up a little in my mouth.

God, I almost trauma blocked the driver situation for that first year or three. My q6600 and 8gb of ram ran like greased lightning, and disabling Aero made it even more responsive than 98SE or XP. (I am a latency and user experience fluidity whore though, so sacrificing eye candy for performance was and still is A-OK with me). The Aero design language was still killer even with the bells and whistles turned off.

The main reason to jump from XP (or 98) was the 64 bit jump and breaking the 4gh ram limit. XP x64 was kinda hot garbage, also due to driver issues if I recall correctly.

Vista honestly wasn’t as bad as we all said/remember, but it was the start of Windows optimization downturn. It worked great on top of the line systems with tons of power, and was the best looking Windows Microslop ever developed.

It just happened to also coincide with the start of netbooks and low power computers going mainstream, and marketing thought that the F1 requiring OS should also be sold on a 3 door hatchback with 60 horsepower.