Is Windows 7 really much better than Vista

The short answer is NO!

Couple of days a ago i discovered a very amazing bug in Windows Vista, after searching for a fix on the Internet i realized that many people have the same problem. And not only it does not have any fix currently but also it's exists also on Windows 7 (And all Vista based operating systems like  Windows Server 2008 etc).

Rest of the story : 

There is a folder in Windows installation directory "C:\Windows\winsxs" it contains mostly require libraries for applications to run. it grows overtime pretty much. for example you may end up with a 10GB folder (Which you can't clean it up!) after only few month. You can read more about it here.

Since this folder contains libraries there are many duplicate files inside it and this files are linked using NTFS hard link feature to consume less disk space. Windows api can't distinguish between normal files and hard linked files, so it calculates disk space incorrectly. You simply don't know how much disk space you're going to need for Vista,Win7. minimum in my opinion is 25GIG (Only for windows itself). which in case of laptops or SSH hard disks is very unreasonable.

My point is this problem is very fundamental. because you might not be able to re-size your partition later. and even if you do, installing an operating system from scratch is a really time consuming and sometimes dangerous task which not at all is acceptable from today's modern operating systems.

This is only one of the many reasons that i didn't replace XP with Vista, and it seems that if i want to use Windows at all, i would have to wait until Windows 7 Service Pack 2 comes out!

Update : This issue still stands , but Windows SP2 is out and it's much more stable than vista now