I had a new laptop somewhere around 2006. Vista was lagging and throwing errors constantly. I switched to beta of windows 7 and it was waay snappier and stable. On the same hardware.
Maybe your Vista installation was messed up or crusty. Did you compare fresh Vista vs fresh 7 for this?
A lot of laptops of the day that came preinstalled with Vista also came preinstalled with a lot of junk that slowed it down like Norton, AT&T, other such bloatware that ran at start-up, and people blamed it all on Vista being slow. Then later they wiped it and installed fresh Win 7 without bloatware, and hey waddaya know, it's faster.
