I'll throw in an anecdote on how people tend to overblame Vista. I have a desktop which also runs on Vista. Over the past few months I noticed it freezes and hangs repeatedly, and my natural instinct was to blame it on Vista. Sometimes it even freezes while booting up just after and before it loads Windows.
Then one day my computer froze during startup. I didn't think it was particularly surprising so I restarted it by resetting the computer. It froze even during the startup, forcing me to reset it again. Finally it came to a point where it couldn't even load Vista, instead it pauses (though not freezes) at a blank screen with an active cursor indefinitely. Trying out the Vista startup recovery disc didn't help either.
I called in the technician and after performing a hard disc scan from the BIOS, he determined guess what? A hard drive failure. And all along I thought it was Vista. Moral of the story: Vista may be the 2nd incarnation of Windows ME but don't overlook other possible factors.
P.S. Owing to my misplaced conviction that it was Vista rather than hardware failure, I didn't back up my data. In hindsight it might have seem obvious that repeated hangs and freezes are a symptom of hard drive failure or possible virus/malware infection. I scanned my PC for the latter but never considered the former.