Vista had a lot of features that made it better than XP, the problem was the features were implemented in a less than optimal manner (notoriously the RAM application storage, which sometimes decides to eat up just about all of your RAM for giggles). Vista wasn't good at being Vista, but it was still a step forward from XP. The intial bandwagon of Vista being bad was due to companies shipping "Vista ready" computers, despite knowing full well that 2GB of RAM is not enough for Vista.