Whatever your thoughts are on Vista, the changes pretty much had to happen. The old driver model was just that: old. Something had to give, and unfortunately a

Whatever your thoughts are on Vista, the changes pretty much had to happen. The old driver model was just that: old. Something had to give, and unfortunately a lot of companies weren't ready. Windows 7 cleaned up much of the UI, fixed some performance issues, and was released at a time that drivers and memory usage weren't as big of a deal. Does that make Win7 that much better than Vista? Not really, but it does make Win7 a better release simply due to timing. I'd say that Apple could have had a similar issue with going from OS9 to OSX, though they at least had a long period of some degree of backwards compatibility. They, however, handled the transition much better since they controlled all of the hardware and drivers.