[Throwaway23412]

>the fact that Windows 7 wasn't all that different from Vista

Say what now? I don't know if you remember but Vista had really high hardware requirements. When Vista came out, it was fundamentally unusable for me. Hardware requirements is literally the first section of criticism in Vista's Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista#Hardware_require...):

>For example, Mike Nash (Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management) commented, "I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine" because his laptop's lack of an appropriate graphics chip so hobbled Vista.

Windows 7 made substantial performance improvements in comparison to the widespread hardware incompatibilities that Vista had.