Vista was fine from the get-go if you had enough (>=4GB) RAM, which OEMs mostly didn't bother shipping.
replyMy ME machine would reliably BSOD when I opened / closed the CD tray.
My first (and only) experience with Vista was with a stripped-back Toshiba Satellite A135 my mom bought my brother and I during some Black Friday sale. It had one single 512MB RAM stick. I still have a screenshot kicking around somewhere of the "Windows Experience Index" of 1.0 or 1.5 or something (1.0 was the lowest) that also shows the RAM amount. We made it work, though. Many good memories of recoding Xbox360 footage using some Lexar capture box that only accepted analog RCA in as the laptop cooked itself alive sitting on the carpet in front of the TV.
replyI bought a machine with similar capability for my wife that shipped with Vista and it was literally unusable. I think I ended up "upgrading" it to XP.
replyI had a big problem with BSODs caused by Nvidia drivers. Of course, you could argue that this was Nvidia's fault, not Vista's, but this was somewhat academic. I moved back to XP (and also started using Linux) and all these problems went away, and I got a lot more out of my RAM to boot.
replyVista was an absolute dumpster fire but in no way compares to the awfulness of ME.
replyThe whole reason I responded to you was because you said "Millennium/2000"
replyMillennium _was_ Windows ME, millennium edition. Windows 2000 was completely different. :)
Vista wasn't remotely a dumpster fire. I used it for almost its entire lifetime, it was totally fine.
replyYeah, Vista Ultimate had animated desktops, it was stable for what I did, used ReadyBoost SD card for increased performance and the HP Pavilion convertable pen/touch screen was awesome. Not everyone had the same experience.
replyPeople did all the XP customization with compositor 3d effects and matrix screensavers. Then they hyped up Longhorn with all the magazines and delivered the Vista dumpster fire.
replyIIRC ME would just randomly crash explorer.exe with task bar disappearing but you could recover some of it. On Vista it was just overall sluggish and laggy visual experience.