*shrugs* I'm going on my experience as well as the experience of countless others - there really weren't that many common issues in Windows Vista that was explicitly the fault of the operating system after the major networking bug was fixed. It may be insulting to put it as blunt as I did, but it's got a pretty big ring of truth to it.
Reinstall Windows Vista and usei t as your default OS today and I'd bet you actual cash that you wouldn't run into any more major issues than you would using Windows 7.

All I used it for was word processing and Solidworks (I was a drafting student), and it had issues before I installed Solidworks. However, I will concede that my problems MAY have been partially due to the fact that I was using a Dell laptop. I'll think about reinstalling and testing it, though. Will it safely dual-boot with Windows 7?

I don't see any reason why not. IIRC the BCD was introduced in Vista.

Yeah, they both use the same exact boot loader so they'll dual boot fine together.
And the OEM junkware that come with new computes always has a bad habit of slowing down/making the OS more unstable. Never judge the performance or stability of Windows based on the average OEM installation.

Like I said in my original post, I removed all the bloatware. First thing I do with ANY new computer.

Still, it's hard to wipe the bloatware off of every nook and cranny of an installation. Installing an OS from a retail disk is what I always used to do when I still bought OEM PC's.

Some bloatware is near impossible to remove, stuff like Norton AntiVirus comes to mind.

Personally, I've had mixed results with Vista. I tried Vista Server 2008 32-bit on my old Dell for a while. It was nice, but for some odd reason, the entire network would always crash at about 10:00 PM if my PC was still on at that time. The network never crashed before I had Server 2008 installed, or if my PC was off by 10:00 PM, or after I installed Windows 7 32-bit. And yes, I was using certified NT6 drivers.

I think I'm gonna go with the 32-bit version for my test reinstall. I seem to recall that the 64-bit version was much buggier.

I ran the 64-bit version with no issues for a good year or so, though I suppose if you're not terribly worried about accessing all your RAM there's no real reason to go 64-bit.

I only have 4 GB of RAM in my desktop anyway. Its greatest flaw. So I'm not really losing out by using 32-bit.

Forgot to mention, even after upgrading to Service Pack 2 the network would still crash while I had Server 2008 installed. Who knows...

I refused using Vista but even if you have a fast computer with much RAM..
A reason for not using Vista is that it started the DRM lock-in continued in 7.
but you dont notice much of it if you just install it in a VM you need to use it for special multimedia related tasks.
Here is what Linux developers have to say to the evolution of Vista and inherited problems:
http://en.windows7sins.org/

Talk about a load of crap. Some of that is very overstretched, to the point that some is just lying (see their claims that WGA inspects users hard drives). And blaming DRM on Windows just because it is secure enough to allow enforcement of it?

I am opposed to DRM, but the blame for that lies firmly with the media companies. It is as simple as they will not do any business without some form of DRM, and though I dislike DRM, I think I and the vast majority would frankly rather have them represented and present on the PC platform than simply denying all access - which they would. At least at this point, we're in a position to reform and wear them down. That's much harder with a flat refusal.

I fully support you. I install Vista(with SP2) on Celeron 430(1.8GHZ), 1.5GB ram, GMA X3000 video card. And she nice work with Aero.

Yeah, it's gotten to the point where Vista has become the punching bag (wrongfully so) of the whole internet, to where people bash it without hardly using it (much like people are doing to Windows 8 right now). Only issue I've ever had with Vista was Libreoffice refused to install on it, but the error code I googled appeared to happen mostly on windows 7, so it's not a fault of the OS somehow.

Also, Windows 8 aero and aero basic look *AMAZING* compared to 7's aero, with which they screwed the pooch on, but still not as good as the rounded dark aero present in Vista.

Question. Does anybody know if the .wim-extraction install method (used to put Windows 8 in a VHD for testing, for example) will work with Vista?

There's your problem.

The performance of vista depends on the computer that Vista is running on. My laptop ran great with it installed, but because my laptop had the specs to run it. Vista isn't bad it is just that not that many had a good enough computer to handle it and then never gave it a second chance with better hardware.

For what it's worth, I was asking around about a new computer, and again, everybody tells me this:

"Don't use Vista. It sucks."
"I wouldn't recommend Vista for anything."
"Whatever you do, don't get Vista."

It's pretty amazing how prevalent this reasonless hate is. I would not have expected this to happen now in 2012.

I had tried it. It worked. So....go ahead. I made a different partition on the HD and extracted the WIM there.

If you're buying a new computer now in 2012, the question of course becomes why would you be using Windows Vista anyways? Presumably it would come with Windows 7.

Well it would be self-assembled, so it would ship with no operating system at all, which means it's one's choice between XP x64, Vista or 7.

Ah well of course, in that case you'd be right.

Microsoft needed two service packs to make Vista really usable for many people. The crashes and so on are stuck in the peoples' minds...
(Well, Windows XP needed two service packs to be really usable, too. Windows 7 didn't, they've learned from Vista. )

...that makes literally zero sense. Following that logic, Microsoft needed four service packs to make Windows 2000 usable.
Service Packs are usually merely updates packaged together with a few other improvements here and there. Windows XP SP2 was really the only example of a huge product update.