Vista I suppose was the biggest mistake of Microsoft be it gaming, computing, etc. Firstly the thing which took it off the eyes of the customers is itself Microsoft’s own highly successful product i.e Windows XP. The people thought it as the best ever operating system produced on this earth. Therefore had resistance to change to Vista. which was indeed very costly too.
Side by side there have been couple of as of Mac rolling around and pushed to air vigorously. Which faded the publicity of Vista, as a result Apple had millions of sale that year.
For years Microsoft had been hugely criticized by developers, beta testers and IT professionals for "software bloat" -adding so many non required changes and features to its programs that the code gets huge and unwieldy. However, this never have enough of an impact on software sales.
With Windows Vista, bloatware appeared to get Microsoft.Vista a real down. This software bloat definitely had the effect of slowing down Windows Vista to the core, especially when it was running on the very latest and super fast hardware which was out of the reach of every man. At that time also, the latest version of Windows XP simply and soundly outperformed the latest version of Microsoft Vista. No one wanted to use a new computer that is slower than their old one and calling it an upgrade bothered everyone.
It even hanged when were up on certain important tasks like preparing some report, presentation or were writing something which hardly required a level of cpu or memory consumption. The bugs was supposed to be the Microsoft’s own hidden service like windows update and other.
I bought the laptop with Vista preloaded and after a very rare use of it for a month, I had to keep on changing my windows to a fresh one again so that it doesnt hangs again and let me do the needed work. I had graphic card of 2GB nvidia, but I even hung it up in between while playing vice city whereas it worked perfectly in WIndows XP with same hardware.
Using Vista was biggest mistake and thus I quickly changed it to XP. I would suggest you to do the same if you are still running it.