Windows Vista Premium Vs. Windows 7
Microsoft's Windows Vista was very unpopular and many Windows users, both personal and professional, opted not to upgrade from Windows XP. Vista Home Premium is the most full featured version of Vista that is designed for the home user and it compares interestingly to Windows 7.
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Memory Usage
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Windows Vista is a memory hog. There is no way around it. Even at its lowest settings and idle Vista uses a significant amount of memory. This due in part to a feature involving memory caching that basically tries to use any free RAM to make your system faster; part of this high memory use can also be blamed on Vista being somewhat bloated. Windows 7 also has the memory caching feature but uses less of your system's RAM while idle, mainly because it is a trimmer system.
Graphics Card Compatability
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Vista has well documented issues with video cards and their drivers being incompatible or semi-compatible; many users found themselves with cards and drivers that were supposed to run properly in Vista but often crashed causing the oft dreaded "blue screen of death." Windows 7 does not inherit the majority of this issue from its predecessor and users will find it easier to get new hardware working on 7 than on Vista.
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Aero and User Interface
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Vista Home Premium also introduced the Aero graphical user experience. This was one of the most popular features in Vista and is continued in Windows 7; 7 also introduced other graphical improvements to the Desktop and user interface, including a revamped task bar.
Networking
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Windows 7 strives to make is easier to get on the Internet and connect to home network and use networked devices than Vista. In some ways 7 does make this easier but there is little real difference between them; the main exception being that Windows 7 tends to have less lag and be slightly faster when working with networks than Vista.
Security
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Security has always been a concern for Windows users and the general computing community and both Windows Vista and 7 attempt to make your computing experience more secure. Vista introduced the "User Account Control" feature, which makes your computer get you explicit permission to do many mundane tasks, such as allow a program internet access. Though this was more secure than previous versions of Windows, it quickly became frustrating for many users and has been toned down in Windows 7.
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