I think it’s different. My dad has Vista, and after a while he changed it to XP because we all agreed it was bad and confusing. I have Windows 7, and I think it’s different because it’s faster, or seems that way, and easier to use, and find files. More tools too.

If you’re asking if it’s a complete re-write of the code from the ground up, no, it’s not. Much of the current code can trace its roots back to Windows NT.

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Mostly, Windows 7 offers evolutionary performance, bug, usability, and security improvements over Windows Vista. Microsoft could have just as easily referred to the release as Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista.

The main thing to note was that Vista was so widely panned by critics and the market, that the marketing department did the only thing they could: gin up a completely new brand identity to get away from the chrome-plated turd that was Vista.

An increasingly sad phenomena in the software industry, large software packages are frequently getting rushed to market before they should be labeled “1.0”. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been from day one.

I asked a question back in May if the changes made from Vista to 7 could have been released as a service pack, but if Microsoft opted to make it a completely new OS to shed the negativity.

Windows 7 is a lot more like Vista than it is like XP. You have the same hinky file structure and other barriers to usability, but it’s a lot more stable and less annoying for typical users.

Not quite. It would be more accurate to say that Vista was Windows 7 v0.5 Beta.

Yes, it’s the same.

(employed as a systems administrator)

@squirbel I disagree, but it may be a matter of semantics. Define “same”. I’ve seen a lot happen in the computer world in the 30+ years I’ve been doing computers, so whether Vista is/isn’t the same as Win7 really depends on your definition of “same”. It definitely isn’t the same as XP, and even further removed from the DOS-based Windows (as opposed to NT-based Windows, like XP) or any *NIX-oid OS, but the relationship between Vista and 7 is a little odd.

I see quite a few differences between the two. Macroshaft started to make 7, and partway through the development process, they released what they had so far as Vista (something they later admitted was a mistake). So it is the same, but it isn’t the same, if that makes sense.