There are lots of reasons for the general hatred. (Disclaimer, I was a beta tester for Vista and was looking forward to it’s release.) The reasons ranged from the change in drivers. People who upgraded to Vista Home suddenly found their network drivers didn’t work, their video might only have minimal video support, their RAM, which was sufficient for XP was suddenly too little for Vista. Programs that worked for years (ahem, decades) now suddenly didn’t work. Then there was the constant prompting to allow programs to run. You have to remember Microsoft had been savaged for years over it’s lack of security, so they gave it to us on steroids. Now, people didn’t like having to give programs access to run every time they ran the program because the program was coded to require some form of Rung 0 access. The User Account Control literally drove people nuts. Run a program? A message would pop-up asking if you wanted to give the program access to your computer. Click yes, then often, you’d get another message asking if Windows should allow the program to access the data on your hard drive. Not good at all. You may be surprised to learn the User Account Control from Vista is still in Windows. It’s just set lower than it was in Vista. And yes, you could change the threshold in Vista. However, you’d get a warning that changing the setting could allow malware into the computer. The version I beta tested, Vista Business had the lower setting, as did the final release of Business. I received my free copies of Vista and was shocked by the difference between Vista Home, which went on my XP Home machine and my Vista Business on my XP Pro machine. Home was buggy, crashed frequently and was generally a wasted of computer. Vista Business had minor issues, but I had worked them out during the beta process. Most people had Vista Home or Home Premium. Both were garbage because what Microsoft cut out was what made Vista worth running. My XP Home machine had an older Voodoo video card and no Vista compatibility. Now, Voodoo did not release drivers in a timely way (re: at all, the company was dead by then.) However, most people in my boat didn’t understand Microsoft (or any other company) is not responsible for maintaining other companies products. And that is the last reason people hated Vista: it didn’t support a lot of older hardware! Legacy hardware has always been a love/hate with Microsoft. Drop too much support and expect people to not move up to the latest OS version, or reject it after upgrading to it.

Microsoft totally changed the user interface with Vista. The Ribbon system was new and while going back to it now is cute, it took getting used to. The office version tied to Vista used it extensively, which caused retraining in Office. Macros that a user may have created wouldn’t work, which again led to hating Vista. For some reason, most of the users I supported didn’t blame Office 2007 (8?) for breaking their macros, they blamed Vista! Vista had become the whipping boy for every problem that developed.

In summation, Vista was hated because it was not an evolutionary change from XP. It changed too much and required too much in the way of hardware to run it properly. Plus, the Starter, Home, and Home Premium versions had too little testing and too much cut out. And the User Account Control were set too strongly in those versions to be useful, further alienating customers. On the plus side, Windows Me was no longer the most hated and buggy version of Windows released to date.