I can second that. After having to work on Vista for a few months during my army time as a conscript, i can say it was a deeply traumatic experience, i hated them
Excuse me while i ramble on for a while, some of you might enjoy the story...
At some point i was attached to a junior officer who took care of the wing's informatics, networks and so on (which naturally didn't run on windows
). My job was to do maintenance work when people called us about PC problems, plus we had to compile a weekly briefing for the unit's commanding officer (a brigadier with a few thousand hours in mirage 2000s). This we usually did on powerpoint with a PC that ran Vista.
Now, the unit i served in didn't operate aircraft, but it still had an important job and lots of things to keep track of. The wing in question is responsible for half the air-defence network of the country and operates patriot missile systems, plus some of its squadrons are situated in different parts of the country.
Well, every week we had to compile an inventory of everything for the briefing, ranging from the amount of personnel and patriot spare parts right down to food rations, point defence flak gun status (operational/under maintenance/unserviceable and in such a case which part failed) and even the amount of individual ammunition rounds for each weapon, right down to our rifles and pistols. After all this there was the secret operational reports (which i naturally lacked clearance to work on) and descriptions of whatever training activities we were involved in. All of this information was broken up in parts where each squadron had its relevant officers supply the data once per week.
Well, there's nothing worse than having a bunch of officers delaying submission of the required data for the briefing until the last 5 minutes, having them suddenly crowd your tiny office all at once for fear of the CO chewing them off if they miss the deadline and Vista throwing tantrums and errors all the while
This experience made me so determined not to ever install Vista, that when i got my current PC i only got 3GB of RAM because the only 64 bit OSes available were XP 64 (limited drivers) and Vista 64 (see story above.)
When win7 became available i remained hesitant for while, until the stream of positive reviews started. I got a license for free through a friend of mine (he was entitled to it through a university program for post-graduate informatics students but he didn't need it as he's using Linux) and installed it on a secondary hard drive.
A month ago my windows XP installation crashed badly due to file system errors, so i finally made the move to win7 x64.
Compared to XP it's like comparing a jet or turboprop to a piston engine: sometimes win7 feels like it needs some "spool up" time where XP would respond immediately, but overall performance when actually running a demanding piece of software is better.