Ask some people why Windows Vista failed and they will tell you that most of the problem came from hardware compatibility. I don’t remember ever having problems with Vista back when I used it. Then again I was running it on a brand new computer with the OS in question preinstalled.
And that’s another thing, I think you’re pretty much expected to upgrade your hardware at least every few years. I’d like to think that the people who had problems with Vista kept the same white-box PC they’ve had since 98SE, or even 95. Vista ran great if you had the right hardware. Maybe if Microsoft had optimized their OS even for XP-era machines it would have seen greater adoption.
I also really liked the Aero glass theme, it made younger me feel like I was in the future. Those gadgets at the side of the desktop were pretty cool too. Overall I think it was definitely ahead of its time, and with support for current software and hardware, would have been a solid choice for average computer users today.
This one. Most systems in the spec didn’t have the RAM to run aero effectively, and ran like shit. If you had 1-2GB of RAM, it worked fine; just you had less of that RAM available to allocate to the same apps that worked great under XP. If you were lucky enough to have a 64-bit processor, Vista was actually pretty nice, compared to the XP 64-bit edition and the driver nightmare that entailed.
All that. I ran the Saturn pre-release and it was a damned nightmare for resource hogging.