What I meant by "isn't marked that obviously" is that the labels didn't help. XP (and 2000 before it) had Total, Available, System Cache in K. Vista used Total,

What I meant by "isn't marked that obviously" is that the labels didn't help. XP (and 2000 before it) had Total, Available, System Cache in K. Vista used Total, Cached, Free in M. Vista cached (rule of thumb applicable then) double the memory compared to XP so the "Free" was usually well under 10% of the memory, even single digit MB. XP rarely had less than 20% available. Forums were flooded by complaints that Vista uses up all the memory, they either saw too much cache, or too little free. It's probably not immediately apparent now but seeing a label "Free 8" leaves a far bigger impression than "Available 89615". As for XP most people upgraded from 98. The resource usage difference was undeniable and so was the driver incompatibility which made most devices not work properly or at all initially. I did not have the experience of XP booting faster than 2000 even on the same hardware but SP1 fixed a lot of issues, maybe also this. For the first couple of years every forum, IRC channel, BBS, or DC hub I read was full of complaints about either performance and compatibility, or stability depending on what people were upgrading from. > So this is not simply explainable by the "people just can't take change" argument. Not only. But it's one big part of the explanation. People are usually skeptical about change and compare around transition time so are inherently biased. They're comparing a stable, fine tuned product with the fresh, rough edged one. The Vista name was dropped because it was already toxic. But Windows 7 is more or less Vista SP3. If Vista didn't flop so hard from the start it would have had the same evolution as XP: launch grumbles grumbles grumbles > SP1 grumbles grumbles > SP2 gru... hey, this is pretty ok > SP3 noice!. Even Win 10, with all its issues, is a far better product today than it was 5 years ago.