My mom's desktop computer came with Windows 8.1 x64 preinstalled when I bought it for her this past May. She is not tech savvy at all, and I think she was confused at first because of the lack of a start menu. Her old Windows Vista desktop had Vista. The reason I am so against Vista, is because it had many issues. It was Dell also. Also, at that time I wasn't interested in technology. That may be why we had so much problems out of it. Now, I am on top of making sure all of our computers get no viruses, and I make sure they are up to date at all times with latest updates from Microsoft. My laptop runs Windows 7 Home Premium x64. Basically, what people have said, is that 7 is basically Vista, but much improved with some differences.
Windows 7 was barely even a warmed over Vista. The problems with Vista were 90% in large part down to the fact that XP was a complete mess. Most people tend to put on the rose colored glasses and forget what a god-awful mess XP was until about the time SP2 came along. For about the first three years of XP's life -- and this is not an exaggeration, if anything it's an downplaying of how bad things were -- literally every week (give or take) there was at least one new remote exploit found in either Windows or IE6. Most weeks were what you might call bumper crops and we saw the birth of the so-called drive-by exploit where all a person had to do was simply load a web page and they could be infected by malware. People forget about how some joker figured out they could send spam using the Windows Messenger service or using that same service, remotely reboot hundreds of computers at a time over the Internet. I don't know what the final tally was on the number of security issues MS squashed during those years, but it had to be well into the triple digits. Wouldn't surprise me if it crossed the half-way mark onto the quadruple digits. Then there was all the software written for Win9x, where you could directly access the hardware, which was now expressly forbidden, which had to be reworked. Software suddenly had to contend with a multi-user platform, which caused a lot of problems. In the early days integrated graphics wasn't up to the task of rendering XP's skinning system adequately and computers only came with 64-128MB of RAM typically. Anyone here ever try using XP on only 128MB of RAM? I have, and trust me, you don't want to. At 256MB it's tolerable, 512MB is where it starts getting to be usable. But back in late 2002, early 2003, that meant a high end computer. XP's rollout was an unmitigated disaster on several fronts.
XP was a mess and long story short, Vista represented a total rewrite of big chunks of XP. One of the things that Vista took the rap for, even though it wasn't Vista's fault, was the poor quality drivers that device makers put out for the first year or two. Vista had a new driver model, which greatly enhanced the security, but also broke compatibility with XP, which was just a warmed over Windows 2000, at least had that much going for it. By the time Vista SP1 came around, most developers had gotten the hang of the new driver model, computer hardware had largely caught up with the elevated bar MS set and the number of complaints from users dropped off significantly.
Like 8, Vista brought with it a number of very nice technical improvements. Aero, the DirectX based, GPU rendered GUI, replaced the CPU rendered GDI+ from before. XP treated dual core CPUs as dual CPUs because dual core CPUs didn't exist when XP was developed. There's a number of subtle differences between the two which leads to XP creating a lot of unnecessary overhead. Vista's security was significantly improved over XP and it made more efficient use of resources. Of course most of these are under the hood type improvements, not the sexy in-your-face improvements, with the exception of Aero. Windows 7 basically just rode a wave of anti-Vista sentiment to popularity, even though there was really very little changed about it. If Vista had come out around the same time as XP SP2, my guess is it would have been welcomed with open arms as an escape from the hell that was XP in those dark first years.