Why do people believe the advertising?

[Trev]

Same reason they put the memory limit on Windows XP as of SP1: shitty programmers.

I think you meant to say "shitty third-party driver programmers." At the time Windows XP was released, it was rare to see more than 2 GB RAM in any 32-bit Windows system, let alone a consumer PC. By the time Service Pack 2 was released, large memory configuration were becoming more common. Many legacy device drivers don't know how to deal with addresses above 4 GB, so 32-bit Windows client SKUs artificially restrict physical memory to 4 GB.

When an add-in card with a large amount of memory is added to the system, the memory is mapped into the area below 4 GB. E.g. A video card with 1 GB RAM lives at physical addresses 3 GB - 4 GB. The system remaps system RAM at those addresses to 4 GB - 5 GB. Since Windows ignores RAM above 4 GB for the sake of down-level compatibility, the remapped RAM is not usable.

Unfortunately, users expect Microsoft to maintain compatibility with legacy third-party device drivers, regardless of how poorly written they are. Now, you can run 64-bit Windows and be done with it, assuming your hardware vendor provides 64-bit drivers. (If they don't, I'd wager their 32-bit drivers are among those that won't work in systems with more than 4 GB RAM.)

[Trev]

btw I've seen the touch screen support and I must say, they didn't create it but they did it pretty freakin' well
oh i didn't answer the question... they believe the ads because they are true. Microsoft asked people what they wanted and then tried to put those ideas into the os. peoples ideas went into 7. I think part of vistas problem was that wasnt the case, they threw in feature after feature without thinking about how the whole thing would actually run

Windows Vista has already been compared to New Coke, so I won't repeat the comparisons here. Unlike Coca-Cola, however, I think Microsoft had the foresight to know it would take a sea change event like Windows Vista's failure to move users beyond the legacy Windows 95 interface into an environment more conducive to novel and innovative user interfaces.

Windows 7 has, however, taken most of the good ideas from Windows Vista--screen composition, object cache, etc.--and made them much more usable. Some things do clash, however. "Sticky" taskbar buttons, for example, attempt to force the UNIX and NeXT/Apple-like single (or forked) process, multiple window paradigm onto all Windows processes. Starting a new instance of a process is now a menu hunt instead of a single click of a Quick Launch button.

[Trev]

I could be wrong but when you get an upgrade version of windows 7 i dont think it really upgrades your previous os, i believe it clean installs and is only called an upgrade version because you need to have vista already to be eligible to purchase it.

For Vista to 7, you can do clean or in-place upgrades. You can also install clean without entering a license key, then "upgrade" the clean install, thereby bypassing the previous version requirement. The end result is the same as a clean install.