system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
With decent hardware Vista actually ran pretty great
gpt
"Windows Vista ready" laptops with 4GB RAM or less were what crippled the OS.

My dad had a Windows Vista netbook back in 2007 with a ~1 GHz single-core Atom (at the time they used in-order processing instead of out-of-order processing, so the IPC was even lower, probably less than Core 2's IPC) and 1-2GB RAM. You could barely get a web browser to run, and that was well before the "Chrome eats RAM" became a thing.