Comment Re:The real reason Windows has the version number. (Score 2) 460
The real reason 7 felt so much faster than Vista: When they made Vista, they planned on you booting up very infrequently, so they scheduled a lot of junk to happen at boot and login, thinking that users would just 'sleep' instead of rebooting. Windows 7 (And Vista SP2) backs off a bit and does the housekeeping when you're not using the computer. Vista actually wasn't really 'slow', it's just 'irrationally busy' doing stuff with the I/O (indexing, precaching, defragmenting, etc.) while you're just trying to get to your gosh-darned desktop.
Also, the reason people had fewer compatibility problems with 7 isn't because Microsoft fixed the OS, it's because software and hardware vendors fixed their applications and drivers.
If you tried to do anything useful on Windows Vista within the first six months after it was released, you probably had a miserable experience. If you tried to do the same stuff on Windows 7 within the first six months of that OS's release, it probably worked fine. What people don't realize is that if you did a clean install of Vista when Windows 7 was released, it would have worked fine too, because the apps had been fixed by then.