[bbatha]

Imo vistas biggest problem was they underspecced the minimum system requirements. Most peoples experience with vista was on sub 1gb of ram machines with a single core, no gpu and 32 bits. Vista was an os for modern architectures first. Windows 7 had the luxury of those features being the default at launch.

[miladyincontrol]

Theres a bit more to that story, leading up to Vista Intel's iGPUs lacked proper DX 9 support, just partial. Particularly 910/915 were marketed as "Vista Capable" but not "Vista Premium Ready".

And the later ones which did have full DX 9 support really weren't that much better. I recall drivers being an absolute mess for a lot of external peripherals too, many that weren't even dated took ages to get something usable for vista if at all.