Was Windows Vista THAT bad?

From my perspective the whole problem with Windows Vista was hardware marketed as Vista Ready that was subpar at best. I was already at the cutting edge of hardware for so long at that point that I used and recommended the latest CPU, memory, GPU and recommend such for all the machines friends and clients wanted to run with Windows Vista, so we had no problems. Being a gamer with high end GPU's helped as well. Many people weren't so lucky, hence the bad rep for a great OS.

Fortunately for Microsoft Windows 7 was a winner out of the gate - especially with the 3 years of hardware upgrades (and upgrade requirement awareness) that had come into users hands from the Vista launch.

I've gotta believe that Windows 10 is going to be similarly derided in the future, once we escape this period of privacy invasion infatuation we are in right now. Having gone through both Vista and Windows 10 time periods, watching all the pain inflicted on users in both generations, Windows 10 is far, far worse.

Was Windows Vista THAT bad?
Linus Tech Tips
Published on Nov 17, 2018

 

I used Vista from launch and had no real issues. Service Pack 1 was a major upgrade that silenced most of the critics I knew online at the time.

 

I liked Vista. Major upgrade from XP. I had decent hardware too so for me it ran good.

I think the major issue of the time was, the hardware wasn't there for the general public. You had to be a gamer damn near to have a vista ready PC.

Most consumer computers barely met minimal requirements.

Second issue was drivers.

Other than that it was good and it was going a great direction Vista>7 until 10 came along of course.

8/8.1 was fine once you installed something like startisback.

 

I wish i could roll back to 7 or even 8.1. I have never had to deal with so much bull till 10 came around.

 

At the time I was on Windows XP Pro x64 - so I had already picked hardware that had x64 driver support on Windows, which rolled over to Windows Vista x64 as well, so no driver problems for my build at least.

There were issues for printer drivers, but network printing worked till those new drivers came out, and they came out pretty quickly.

Given all the hoopla about Windows Vista and the Windows 7 upcoming "potential" for similar issues I elected to join the Windows 7 roll out party deal and got in early on the development as well.

Windows 7 was a total non-issue except for minor driver updates, must be the cleanest Windows roll out ever.

If Microsoft could pull that off with a cleaned up fully QA'd Windows 11 release, I might just be interested again... fat chance that happening, but one can dream.

 

the big issue I'm having right now is every time I turn around half my damn drivers are deleted.

I have a killer 1535 and 2400 in this laptop that I cant even use because windows 10 wont let me install or keep the drivers.

 

For me an OS is a tool to run my apps/programs. Vista served me just fine in that regard, as did Windows 7 and 8/8.1, and now 10.

From what I recall with Vista, a lot of hardware/software companies didn't produce drivers that met Microsoft's requirements. But Microsoft took the blame.

That said, I do believe 7 is what Vista should have been. Simple things like being able to move the order of open applications on the taskbar were long overdue. This all seems obvious now, if only it was at the time.

Charles

 

Just before Vista came out I bought 2 Dells. A 17" Studio and a 17" XPS full loaded ($5500.00) for the 2 of them. Both had XP Pro and they worked great. At the time since I just got them Dell had a deal on Vista so I grabbed it and boy was that a big mistake. After installing it them 2 Dells were so slow . I never seen anything like it. Even after the service pack was installed it never helped one bit. I went back to XP Pro on my XPS but the girlfriend kept Vista on hers until W7 came out then we both upgraded to W7. That was the easiest upgrade I have ever done and she still uses her Studio 1710 to this day which is at least 8 years old and works just as good as any new one. My XPS is still going strong with W7 but I only use it now in my tv room. Both will never see Vista on them again for sure. As far as I am concerned Vista is just like W10 but with a little less window dressing.

 

I still think Windows Vista is the best looking windows OS. The wallpaper, the theme, everything looks elegant.

Windows 7 gets second place from me.

 

I always found it funny the love for Win7 and the hate for Vista. All Win7 was was a service pack for Vista that Microsoft decided to charge money for. Even microsoft decided to shun Vista by not offering updates for it despite Vista and 7 basically having the same kernel and driver models.

I'm just trying to think of what changed between Vista and 7:

1. An intermediate options between UAC fully on or fully off was introduced. Actually implementing this change for MS in code was trivial.

2. GPU drivers from multiple vendors could run at the same time. This may or may not have required significant work.

3. The extra ring around the windows start logo was removed.

4. ???

By charging money for Win7 instead of just making it a service pack, MS somehow got a clean slate image for reselling the same thing. Also no one cared that MS started putting in arbitrary road blocks for Vista users in the form of dropping update support and drivers that support win7 refusing to even attempt to install on Vista.

 

Nothing of what you mentioned made any difference for me, I had forgotten all those things.

The biggest selling point for me was the task bar. Now I could FINALLY use the same button to start a program, AND to switch between programs. No more need for the quick launch buttons.
This made it possible to finally ditch the Start menu. I kept most programs in the Task bar, and those programs I rarely used I just searched for.

So yeah, the Start menu has pretty much only been a search window for me for 9 years, and that's why I didn't mind the new looks of Windows 8's new Start, because pressing the windows key and start typing worked just like before. I prefer using the keyboard for this.
YMMV if you're more mouse oriented and just love to dig into complicated trees of subfolders with programs in the Start menu.

Also I remember the stock folder structure in Vista being very cluttered even at first boot with no programs installed, can't remember why tho.

Are we talking about Vista RTM or Vista SP2? I wouldn't really mind using the latter even today. IMO there's a bigger difference between Vista RTM and Vista SP2, than Vista SP2 and W7 RTM.

 

Forget Windows 10, it's Windows Vista -- 2018 Edition we want! Betanews.com
People have often said that Microsoft operating systems follow a pattern, with good and bad versions alternating -- Windows 95 (bad), Windows 98 (good), Windows Me (bad), Windows XP (good), Windows Vista (bad), Windows 7 (good), Windows 8.x (bad), Windows 10 (good -- now at least).

It’s mostly true, although if Windows Vista had been given the same length of life that Windows 10 has enjoyed to date, there’s a good chance a large portion of Windows users would still be using it today. Vista wasn’t bad as such, just very unfinished. If the aging OS had a modern makeover, could it win over Windows 10 users? I suspect so. Feast your eyes on the Windows Vista -- 2018 Edition and make up your own mind.

And if all this talk of Vista has you feeling nostalgic for the 11 year-old OS, perhaps you'd care to read our launch story from 2007!

 

Not to mention Vista SP2 with the Platform update made Vista even more closer to 7 with things like DX11.

 

For me I really liked Windows Vista. It was a huge jump over windows XP in terms of visuals mainly, and the addition of some neat things here and there.

My computer was top of the line at the time, so I had no issues whatsoever.
Intel Core2Quad Q6600
Nv 8800 512 MB
4GB RAM

Good times

 

Vista was ok after the service packs.
the problem at launch was there were very few drivers ready for Vista, so many people were encountering errors and crashes and an unusable system. Windows XP (ignoring the bad 64 bit only version) used a 32 bit core with the legacy 16 bit core, allowing 32 and 16 bit code to run fine (just not real mode DOS applications). Vista (64 bit) removed that and stuff wasn't ready.

When windows 7 came out, the drivers were ready (if not, Vista drivers worked).

 

I ran two screens back then. With XP I could only run video on the main monitor, on secondary I would get just a black square.
With Vista I could play video on both monitors but OS would crash, if I moved a playing video from one monitor to another. No driver update ever fixed that. That feature alone was big enough for me to continue using Vista on that computer.

When Win7 came out, I could actually do it without crashing. Woo.

 

IT WAS AWESOME

THE LOOKS OMG, xp looks like win 3.1 lol, so outdated

and the gpu UI, OMG, so fluid, but yes, it was taxing on **** pcs with intel gma 945 (almost every laptop at the time)

also performance in games was a little slower, but it was fixed well over the time,

using ati x800pro
2gb
pentieum 4 ht 3.4ghz

it was ok for the time

i gamed on xp and used vista for everything else

i hated the annoying new drivers, and how it kill old games, this was a pain, no msdos, no win98 95 games,

 

Hmm ... $3,092.61 laptop ran XP fine at 1920x1200p, but Vista couldn't. By the time time 7 came out it was another laptop, so it didn't matter anymore and never missed the bling anyway; 7s are also running XP-style (and so are any Windows Server VMs under my control ).

Heck, I'd run those things black-and-white if that'd do them any good ...

 

For me, Vista really was THAT bad when it came out. Compatibility issues (non-graphical) made my favorite game all but unplayable, to the point that I played it on a hopelessly outdated Northwood Pentium 4 instead. Graphical artifacts made about 40% of the levels of my second-favorite game unplayable. My chipset or CPU produced an obnoxious electrical noise while in Vista. And I think there was at least one other fairly major issue that escapes me at the moment. But all of these issues went away when I switched to XP.

This was with a fairly high-end laptop for 2007, the Inspiron whose specs are in my sig, minus a couple intervening CPU/RAM/SSD upgrades.

And it had been sufficiently painful that I never went back to Vista, nor to 7, which as Khenglish pointed out was essentially Vista with the rough edges smoothed out. Perhaps with SP1 or SP2, it would have been tolerable, and the community eventually figured out how to make my favorite game run well with Vista (it took awhile), but after seeing all my issues disappear with XP, I had no desire to go back and find out.

 

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Related: NBR Flashback: Technologies That Started with Windows Vista

Charles

 

See, the thing with Windows Vista, was that there were two types of certification.



Any computer that had the 'basic' logo, or had another logo: would experience extremely sub-par performance.

I got a brand-new desktop in 2007, which had 2 GB of DDR2 RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (high-end at the time). It had zero issues with Vista. I agree with @ssj92: Vista was (and still is) Microsoft's best-looking OS, and oddly enough, Apple's OS from the same era, Mac OS X Leopard, was equally good-looking. Both fully utilising the 3D capability of the GPU to provide a seriously beautiful user experience, that has since been steamrollered over by the 'flat' design language.

Vista got a huge UI overhaul; some icons from the Vista era still haven't been replaced in 10.

 

Yes, I could never understand all the complains about Vista, I had it on my work computer and never had any problems at all.
Win 10 is another story altogether, I've been struggling with it since pretty much first days it was released and it still the same garbage. And all those new programs designed for Win10, I get WTF moment almost every time I use them and it's such an effort to get rid of them all.

 

Vista was ahead of its time and sadly a lot of PCs wasnt ready for it due to compatibility issues. The system requirements for it was pretty demanding at the time. Back in 2007 i bought my first laptop that came with Vista and I didnt really have issues with Vista but it became very stable after the service packs and then after Windows 7 was released to the public i quickly upgraded but i still enjoyed using Vista because of the UI. When people say that Vista was Microsoft's worst OS they have no clue about Windows ME which was unstable as hell and it was quickly dropped by Microsoft because it was that bad. My first PC came with Windows ME so i experienced all of the problems with it. I had to upgrade to Windows XP because Microsoft Office 2003 wouldnt install on ME and we needed it in order to do a school project.

Despite of Vista's bad reputation a lot of good things came out of it, mostly Windows 7 which was Vista was supposed to be and also it helped create future OSes like Windows 7/8/8.1 and 10 since they was built on the same kernel as Vista.

 

Very well said! I use Vista on my Dell Adamo 13, they looks georgeos together. I would install even on a modern hardware, but the Windows 7 trick somehow not working...

 

It is certain that Vista is far way better than 10 and can slightly compete with 7. Have been using Vista for years and besides Microsoft crapwares like Winows Update and some missing features like SSD TRIM, it is tamed and mature Windows edition that you can use. My 2 cents.

 

SSD Trim started in W7. No Vista was good for it's time but O/S moves on for security and hardware reasons. Technologies moves on that is the nature of Computers and O/S and it won't stop. Windows 10 has elements of 7 and XP as Microsoft learned the lesson from Win8 debacle. If you haven't tried W10 as your older hardware will not work isn't a reason to be biased against W10. I can use your second line and instead of "vista" but "Window7" in place and the format would be different. They can't continue to support outdate O/S that is the fact of O/S lifespan. You can still use the older O/S but connecting to the internet increases the security risk a botnet or malware laden site will be waiting to load onto your system because it sees outdated O/S that won't protect your system anymore. Updated A/V will not protect any more then a user whom clicks on a infected email or link or site that more or less gives permission to launch the malware.

 

I find using something like uBlock Origin on chrome or most decent adblocks do a very good job at protecting you from most things.

 

Yup, also ScriptSafe + Ghostery + Youtube Ad Blocker help to reduce the network / compute load, and TheGreatSuspender recovers lost cycles on otherwise hidden "idle" tabs.

Running all of those extensions and more even on 10 year old hardware still runs great. It's amazing how much extra you can get out of that old hardware if you can "hold your nose" at the lack of "power".

 

uBlock Origin works on video sites like youtube as well so one less extension needed.

 

ublock origin misses some, the YAB finds and blocks ad's I would otherwise see - that's why I added it, current count shown by YAB is 87,846 blocked with 1 day 19 hours and 38 minutes saved otherwise lost time watching ad's. YAB also blocks Facebook Ad's.

 

That's weird, I have never seen a single youtube ad in like five years running ublock origin. Unless you meant other video sites.

 

Could be YAB catches them first, but so far it's working for me, some overlap is ok especially if one filters it out before the other sees it. I was still seeing "print" and other inline ad's with only ublock Origin in Youtube and Facebook, so maybe it's just my use - but I do enable *all* the filters in ublock origin...as usual YMMV

 

Nailed it.

And regarding drivers: Moving from XPDM to WDDM f*cked over a lot of early adopters, thanks to Intel who did not release WDDM drivers for the then-integrated graphics of the time.
Windows Vista Preview editions supported the older XPDM standard for GPU drivers, which may have led beta testers to believe that their integrated graphics would work fine in the retail product.
That was not to be.

Vista was simply ahead of its' time (on launch) and vendors were not ready for it (mass uptake and driver availability).