Going from Windows XP to Vista was a painful experience
. Not only were there some issues with Vista at first, the hardware requirements were ridiculous. Even if you met the specifications to run Vista, the system was extremely slow and sluggish. Windows 7 finally offers an experience where one can upgrade and not feel slighted. This new operating system does not leave one feeling they have a slower computer.
Much of the time in the computing world everyone feels that the machine must have more power year after year. Realistically this is pointless just like buying a car that goes 150 miles an hour is since you can't really drive that fast on the roads as is. Windows 7 finally takes a step back and realizes that making an operating system that demands more from the user's hardware isn't the best option. Eventually the hardware statistics to run an operating system would have been outrageous if Windows 7 was as big of a jump as Vista.
On many machines Windows 7 is only taking up somewhere around 550 to 750 megabytes of ram which is a considerable improvement. On most machines with at least 2 gigabytes, this leaves plenty of space for other processes and applications. For the most part these applications are fairly similar to what they were six years ago so it's senseless to have to have three or four times the computer power just to run the same things.
One element that probably helped Microsoft focus was the netbook market. Vista did run on some high end netbooks but realistically could not on many of them. Microsoft had to start selling XP on the netbook platform because it was the only operating system that would work. Windows 7 had to be a slim version of Vista instead of a larger one to capture this market.
Windows 7 has proven to be a strong platform to replace Vista. Give it a try, you will wonder how your computer ran without it!