I had Vista for a year and a half. It came pre-installed on a computer that I purchased. I hated it just like everyone else, but when I first turned it on, I remember thinking to myself, "This is a modern operating system". It just looks, and somehow feels different than XP et al. in a way I can't really put my finger on, but it is there.
Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. It is all the things I liked about Vista, and none of the things I hate. With Vista on this machine, I was able to shut it down properly one f****** time in the final four months I had that OS. I got a copy of Win7 Pro in November for free through the MSDNAA, and I dumped Vista over Thanksgiving break. Since then, I have had only one problem with it: AMD refused (until March 26, finally...) to make a driver for my graphics card that let me take advantage of its GPU. But other than that, I have had zero problems with it.
My computer has not crashed at all since I got Win7. Like, not even one time, in almost half a year. And I don't exactly play nice with this thing either. The only time I even managed to get a BSOD was when I tried loading a display driver written for 32-bit Vista machines (this one has Win7 and a 64-bit processor), and I really don't think I can fault the OS for that one :P
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