I remember reading that before SP1, performance was very unpredictable; I read one review where it performed okay on a mediocre machine but was abysmally slow o

I remember reading that before SP1, performance was very unpredictable; I read one review where it performed okay on a mediocre machine but was abysmally slow on a high end machine. SP1, allegedly, fixed a lot of those problems, but by that time Vista's reputation was beyond repair. The driver situation might have been made worse by the transition to 64-bit. I remember a friend of mine tried XP 64bit back in the day, and the system crashed constantly because some driver had been written with the assumption that a long is exactly 32 bits wide or something like that. As far as Windows goes, I really liked 7. The UI was reasonably pretty and useful, performance was not too bad, compared to earlier versions, security was much better (or so I'm told, not being an expert).