1  "Windows 7's biggest competitor will be Windows XP" (Joe Wilcox) ... "Microsoft's last operating system, Vista, was so poorly reviewed that many people simply stuck with machines running the eight-year-old Windows XP system" (Phil Schiller). .. Perhaps Windows 7's competition isn't so much XP as it is apathy.

 2  It's bloated and top-heavy, with an insatiable appetite for state-of-the-art hardware. Basically, it chews up CPU and memory capacity like it's going out of style. .. What is it, exactly, that Windows 7 does so much better than its leaner, meaner, pre-Vista ancestors?

 3  One fairly universal complaint is that Vista is bloated and needs a lot more hardware to make it work well compared to XP. Microsoft tacitly acknowledges this problem ...