I'm prepared for my satellite connection to be crippled tonight after it is "Fap'd" for this large download.
I don't cart for Vista much mostly because of a few quirks but it isn't as bad as everyone claims it is.
It is not a memory hog, in fact it manages memory more efficiently than XP. You have to consider it's doing much more than XP under the hood hence the higher requirements.
I run it fine on my AMD64 X 2 3800+ @ 2.0 Ghz PC with a Geforce 6150 and 1 gig of ram and I don't notice any performance decrease or hit when compared to XP. In fact a lot of my games run faster on Vista than XP.
Now that a service pack is out, it should be a lot better in terms of performance and bugs.
All the anti Vista fud everone keeps spouting is the same old same old as before when any new MS operating system came out.
Windows 95 Users:
I'm not upgrading to Windows 98 lol it's too slow and full of bugs, I'll wait for SP1/SP2/SP3/Whatever.
Windows 98/Me/2000 users:
I'm not upgrading to Windows XP lol it's too slow and full of bugs, I'll wait for SP1/SP2/SP3/Whatever.
Now it's the same with Vista, in a few years Vista will be top dog and have great performance and the anti-vista/xp/98 crowd will have a whole new animal to complain about (Windows 7).