vista launched in 2007 and got absolutely dragged for being slow, especially on the low spec hardware a lot of PCs shipped with at the time. the constant UAC popups asking you to confirm literally everything didn't help either, people made fun of it nonstop. microsoft basically did damage control by rushing windows 7 out in 2009, which reused a lot of vista's under the hood work but felt way snappier. vista support finally ended in 2017.
preeti_sinha was it really that much slower or is that just internet meme exaggeration at this point?
rachel_moore no it was genuinely slow, especially anything with under 1gb of ram, which was still common in 2007
andrew_shaw makes sense, hardware just hadn't caught up to what vista wanted yet
worth saying vista wasn't all bad, it introduced stuff like windows search indexing and the aero glass look that people actually liked. it just launched at a bad time with bad driver support
the UAC thing genuinely broke my brain as a kid, every single click was do you want to allow this program to make changes to your computer lol. windows 7 fixed like 90 percent of the annoyance without changing much under the hood