I absolutely loved Vista. It was very slow in some respects, most notably the GUI with all the XAML or whatever it was called, but fast in others. The first service pack was an improvement. The new security stuff and split privilege "integrity levels" and the 100% redesigned networking system with integrated IPv6, and IPv4 redesigned according to IPv6, design principles was excellent. Full disk encryption was great too, used it on laptops. Loved everything about it. Win7 was the big performance jump. WinXP SP3 was a big periformance jump too which makes me wonder if a succession of huge improvement in their compiler code generation was behind it all. Compilers have made some impressive advances in a number of areas that affect code quality hugely in the last 12 years or so.