What's so much better about this than Vista?

[protokiller]

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't like 7, but for it to sell 234% more in the opening days and for all the reviewers to agree it's a huge upgrade seems a little strange.

It's Vista with a new GUI and a crazy huge taskbar and uses slightly less memory.

Am I missing something?

 

[Jonmor68]

"Am I missing something?" Yes, there is a lot more, read some of the reviews.
No one is going to attempt to answer that question in full here.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=windows+7+review&meta=&aq=2&oq=Windows+7

 

[frozenlead]

There's a lot under the hood you don't see:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/1845-63-windows-multithreading


Also, there's lots of extra "niceties". By that I mean, majorly, the redone left panel in Windows explorer, that can now be customized easily. There are a couple other nice shortcuts and such that make you feel good when you're looking for something. Lots of the setting GUIs have been redone, too - just take a look at the screen properties panel.

 

[sminlal]

Well, Windows 7 is just the next iteration of Vista, after all. One of the reasons it's been better received is that it's had the benefit of all of the fixes that have been applied to Vista over the last few years, as well has hitting the market after pretty much all the hardware vendors have gotten on board with 32- and 64-bit drivers.

The people who are most enthusiastic about Windows 7 are the ones who are upgrading from XP, not from Vista. They're seeing a lot more stuff that's new to them. There are still a lot more XP systems than Vista systems out there, so the noise you hear about Windows 7 is disproportionately from more ex-XP users than ex-Vista users.