I bought a laptop with this pre-installed on it. I heard the negative reviews from people talking about it being a ram hog but I needed a new PC so didn't have much choice considering that virtually all the new computers at the time were installed with Vista.

What people said was true, it is indeed a ram hog. Applications didn't exactly run smooth and this is on a 4gb laptop.

I managed to do a few tweaks to the OS by turning off aero etc and the OS now runs much more smoothly.

I don't rate Vista much at all because of the ram factor, there is a reason why Microsoft bought out Windows 7!

There are no new features that have made things any easier or convenient as such.

If you already have XP, stick with that, it's much more easier on ram and it's just as good as Vista.

Vista doesn't provide any new benefits and my friends share that same opinion.