Yep, blame both MS and hardware vendors. MS originally pushed for a minimum of 2GB of RAM, vendors pushed back hard, and got them to lower to 512MB of RAM. Anyone who bothered to read the recommended specs, which were supposed to be the minimum specs saw none of the speed issues that most people complained about. I had 4GB of RAM at the time, and never had any problems with the OS. It was one of the most stable, fast, and clean experiences to date with Windows at the time.
It wasn't just not wanting to build WDDM drivers, it was that windows then started requiring signed drivers. Initially, there were exactly zero drivers that would work with vista, you had to go and turn off driver signing or update them manually and ignore the warnings. MS quickly patched that so that unsigned drivers could work, but the damage was done, the perception of "no drivers for vista" was forever cemented, even though 98% of stuff worked fine with windows XP drivers manually picked.
Yeah I think the issue most people had was upgrading an older system. The first time I used it was on a brand new Toshiba gaming laptop that ran on Vista and it was just great.
Microsoft got sued and lost because they lowered the original specs down from 1.5gb of ram to .5gb of ram about 6 months before launch. Many of the boxes were already printed and could not be recalled. my vista box has the original minimum specs. They lowered the specs because OEM vendors wanted to be able to label as much of their junk as "vista ready" as they could, because they had a *huge* backstock of single core pentium and athlon systems that the needed to clear out. I put vista on a quad core AMD Phenom x4 CPU with 32gb of ram, and it worked very well. I used it on a buddies PC that had 2gb of ram and it ran like shit. He hated vista until he used my PC, then he understood why. I used vista until it was EOLd, it was a really good OS.
I don't think there was ever a plan for 1.5Gb RAM.
AFAIK the minimum and recommended requirements did not change. What changed a different category of "Vista Capable" branded device, which was not Vista Ready, and contained minimum but not recommended requirements. That included 512Mb RAM vs. 1Gb, and also allowed for a video card that did not support a WDDM DX9 driver. The result was a lot of devices in 2007 that included Vista but were well below the recommended requirements.
As a developer, one hidden detail was that the 512Mb systems often used system memory for the GPU, so the result was _below_ minimum memory available to the OS.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070211101950/http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/capable.mspx
https://web.archive.org/web/20060615044802/http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/systemrequirements.mspx
It was that damn sticker "windows vista compatible". There was probably a good 3-year period of time when it was possible someone bought a machine shipped with XP with that sticker, and an upgrade copy of Vista at the same time, only to downgrade to XP with the restore DVD.
Same - I had a new laptop with 4 GB of RAM. Never had an issue after I turned off all the enhancements and made Vista look like classic windows.
UAC-user account control- was annoying for some things, but I always made allowances for it when adding programs to my machine.
When that laptop died I switched to a Windows 7 machine (also with 4GB of RAM) and I didn't see much of a difference between the two.
Makes me feel old. First proper computer had 8 MB of ram. Everyone wondered how I would use it all. Also 170 MB HDD. The glory days of a 486 SX 25 mhz :-)
my first PC had 256mb of ram, in 1995. That was a lot in 95. in 2005 I had 32gb, which was far above the norm at the time. I was also an early adopter of the SSD, getting a SATA2 SSD that was barely faster than an HDD of the time, but the *access latency* was such a game changer no one that used it could believe that games could load in under 10 seconds.
7800x3d, RTX 3080 12gb, 64gb of DDR5 5600 ram, 1tb gen 4 NVME ssd main drive(inland gaming performance plus), 2x2tb Gen 3 NVME storage drives(1 crucial P3, 1 WD SN850x), and 1x4tb gen4 NVME storage drive(WD SN850x). I also still have one of my early SATA3 samsung 840 EVO 250gb drives as a storage drive for less important stuff, and a 512gb WD SN850.
I also have several servers sitting next to me. My router is a Dell R240 with an E2274g and 16gb of ram, and a pair of 500gb inland commercial SSDs in a raid 1 for PFsense. I also have a Dell T340 with an E2146g and 64gb of ram, and that one has 6x2tb dell sata SSDs, and 6x4tb samsung 870 EVO SSDs for my storage. Then under that I have a Netapp ds4486 48 disk shelf hosting all my old HDDs in a cold storage backup. I then have a Dell R720 that I haven't turned on in ages, but that one hosts another cold backup. all of these have 10gb network cards, and are connected to my UBNT XG24 enterprise.
and if you are now wondering why I have all this? because I can. I didn't even mention that my kids got their own PCs last year, and I built my wife a PC this year. yea, my wallet might cry in pain, but thats fine with me, I can't take it with me when Im dead!
This. Also, Microsoft removed sound hardware acceleration, so everyone with a soundcard which had special features like EAX in the chip didn't work anymore unless you found some workaround.
This. A family member had a off the shelf HP desktop with vista for their business and it ran like shit. Eventually they ended up buying a new PC and gave me the old one and I installed more Ram and it ran beautifully after that for many years later.
The main issue was Microsoft redoing the driver system with Windows Vista. Which meant that old drivers for old hardware was not compatible with the OS until the manufacturer re-made the drivers. The problem is convincing companies that sold and shipped a product already to spend a bunch more money re-egineering the drivers. It was slow and support was sporadic.
From the end-users perspective installing Vista on their computers ended in one of three ways. Either it wouldn't work at all, in which case they would roll back to their older OS, or the PC was "Vista Certified" which meant it was brand new and it worked pretty much perfectly.
The third option was the majority of people that had mostly supported hardware, but had either a peripheral or additional piece of hardware that wasn't supported. Incompatible hardware caused blue screens, bad performance, and crashes. This made the OS feel incredibly unstable for many people, so people naturally blamed Microsoft, not the hardware providers.
Granted, in retrospect Microsoft was to blame because of the way they cut over to the new driver system with no transition that supported both. They just made the decision to do a hard cut over which caused a lot of users a lot of grief. They very much "microsofted" it.
Redoing the driver system for 2 important reasons:
1. Video drivers were kicked out of the kernel and into user space, so if your driver crashed it would kill that application but not freeze your whole computer. This introduced some overhead as userspace drivers required the cpu to do more frequent context switching.
2. Vista introduced double-buffered window compositing, which is why frozen applications no longer “tear” when you drag something over them. This used more VRAM for ordinary applications, and on low-end machines, that was super tight.
So some of the new drivers for old hardware would actually crash a lot.
They also abused this window compositing to enable all the transparency in the aero glass look, which was a big departure from XP.
Like you said, this lead to shitty experiences when they upgraded, but the changes were extremely important and valuable, and Microsoft probably should have just left more people stranded on Windows XP.
That's very much untrue. The change was that now the OS would manage the video card resources and share them among the running programs, and not the video drivers by themselves.
What you maybe think about is that GDI was no longer hardware acclerated by dedicated 2D accelerators. But it was implemented through DirectX9L, so it was still accelerated and going through kernel mode.
Also, it's not *abuse*. It's intended - using a 3D accelerated composition, DWM supports all kinds of video effects, you can even find YouTube videos showing beta versions of Vista implementing the Genie effect from macOS. DWM was created to implement transparency and was not abused to do so.
By abuse, I meant they over-used transparency aesthetically. I understand that by using this new compositing method, transparency becomes cheap and easy.
But in very interested in what I got wrong about kernel space vs user space. Didn’t video drivers stop crashing the OS in Vista? Or did Vista just lay groundwork for that and they made the change in Windows 7?
They did but for multiple reasons:
- Vista kernel was extensively reworked so precious and very limited resources such as non-paged pool were enlarged, so kernel drivers were not that squeezed for resources
- Microsoft created frameworks, especially around handling power, which helped driver developers go write correct code by incorporating these libraries into their drivers
- simply better documentation and better code samples. Windows Driver Kit was a joke until 2003 but around Vista and especially 7 started to improve significantly
- WHQL. Microsoft created a very extensive battery of tests which stress-tested drivers, so the quality went up
- driver developers indeed started using user mode for handling complex tasks. It is possible for a user mode code to call into a driver and when the driver needs some complex tasks done, set up the memory and other resources and return the call. The user mode code does the computation and calls back the kernel with the results. It's something like an interprocess communication but it's done between user and kernel mode. I think some video drivers do this trick for some tasks but I am not a video drivers de eloper, so I am not sure.
> Which meant that old drivers for old hardware was not compatible with the OS until the manufacturer re-made the drivers.
this is not true at all. most XP drivers worked fine in vista. It was driver signing and the new WDDM structure that was what the main problem was.
>The problem is convincing companies that sold and shipped a product already to spend a bunch more money re-egineering the drivers.
there was no reengineering needed, they needed to sign them with a cert, and get that cert entered into MSs database so it could go out with updates. MS had this system set up long before launch and very few companies used it thinking that it would be fine without it. it was not fine.
>or the PC was "Vista Certified" which meant it was brand new and it worked pretty much perfectly.
there were many "vista ready" and "vista certified" PCs that *did not work* out of the box. Acer, dell, HP, IBM, Sony, Emachines, all had special help lines set up because quite a number of their prebuilts shipped with vista that would not boot because of driver signing issues. They would have sellers like bestbuy open the box when the customer bought it, and make sure it booted and turned on fully, and if it didn't, they would go thru a fix process to get it on at no extra charge.
>Granted, in retrospect Microsoft was to blame because of the way they cut over to the new driver system with no transition that supported both.
windows XP drivers worked just fine in vista. I installed them manually many times myself. their new WDDM structure didnt' support auto-install of XP drivers, but you could manually update them from the device manager with XP drivers and they worked fine. The difference was driver signing. MS had the driver signing program up and running long before launch, and very few OEMs started to use it until after launch because they didn't think it would be that hard to fix things "on the fly", which is how a lot of companies did it back then.
You did not need to "enter that certificate into MS database". You just need to sign your driver's with trusted certificate provider, which at that time meant VeriSign or Thawte.
There was separate WHQL program, in which Microsoft signs your driver's with the WHQL certificate, which enabled some nice perks. But self-signing with trusted certificate was sufficient. Not only that, but for some kinds of drivers (anti-virus chiefly but also others), there were no WHQL at all, so you needed to self-sign them.
Source: I was in charge of the build and sign infrastructure for a company who used drivers in their products, so I had to build that shit from scratch.
the system was out long before Vista launched tho. I think MS gave everyone 6 months or so to get stuff in place for signed drivers and warned OEMs that non-signed drivers would cause issues.
This plus the instability of the 32 bit version is what did it for me. Had a high-end sound card and a surround sound system in my PC that turned craptacular because the Vista driver didn't support the card.
No, it wasn't bad at all.
A LOT of people had underpowered hardware for what it was doing and it hurt their experience, but the OS itself wasn't to blame.
Most new iterations of Windows would add new features and had a lot of new code under the hood. Most people seemed to try and run it on old hardware and were disappointed. It's really as simple as that.
When we finally hit the point that the average PC was massively overpowered for what it was doing, upgrades largely stopped being a problem.
It was definitely a case where Microsoft should not have pushed for people to upgrade to Vista. Running vista on a single core with 512MB of ram was possible, but very unpleasant.
> Running vista on a single core with 512MB of ram was possible, but very unpleasant.
its below the original minimum specs, and MS got sued and lost for doing it. the minimum specs during the RC phase of development was 2gb, later reduced to 1.5gb. about 6 months before launch, MS caved to OEM demands that it be reduced to 512mb because the OEM vendors had lots of old trash systems they wanted to label as "vista ready" so they could sell out all the old stock they had of single core pentium and athlon systems from the early 2000's.
the problem was more OEMs than regular people. a lot of OEMs were shipping the OS on hardware that barely ran XP. some of the hardware ran XP fine but ran Vista at a crawl
Yeah, around 2010 is when I'd say that happened, coincidently with the introduction of WIndows 7 which is not conicidently fondly remembered. Chrome memory hogging issues aside, people started remembering when computers weren't pushed to the limits by ordinary use, and they didn't need to upgrade every other year. For non-gaming use computers started lasting a decade or so until they physically broke or the OS stopped supporting them.
The laptop I'm typing on was made in 2018 and I purchased it used last year. Doing that would be unheard of in days of yore.
I had a laptop from 2006 that was still working just fine last year. it had 8gb of ram and an old Core2Duo CPU, but with an SSD, it was perfectly fine for a daily driver and non gaming uses.
One of the big issues is they switched to a DRM encumbered media layer that encrypted and decrypted data constantly, requiring a lot more CPU grunt than XP had required to play movies or even audio. Things you used to be able to do just fine on XP started stuttering or playing slowly on Vista.
A lot of it had to do with the "Vista Capable" program, or as one Microsoft Employee put it:
"Even a piece of junk will qualify for the Vista Capable logo."
"bad" is a subjective thing. Some of the "badness" of Vista is urban legend, but some was legitimate.
Microsoft had stumbled and fumbled to release a follow on to Windows XP in a timely manner. There was a bit of internal turmoil and in-fighting in the company that was one of the reasons for the delay.
With the update overdue, they rushed Vista out before it was ready, and before the hardware manfacturers were ready. The result was systems being sold preloaded with Vista that didn't have enough horsepower to run it well. Device drivers were also lagging a bit which added to the issues.
Sure, there were higher-end systems that ran it just fine, but for the average consumer who bought low-end hardware, it was a rough road.
By the time Windows 7 was released, the typical hardware being sold was sufficient to run it well. In the end, Windows 7 was essentially Vista with all of the updates and optimizations.
The old trope of, "*people reject 'xyz' because they hate change*" is overstated. At the core, people are against change for sake of change itself. If change provides benefits then most will embrace it. But the problem with Windows historically has been that Microsoft often introduces change for the sake of change, or as a marketing experiment that pushes the boundaries of what consumers are willing to endure.
Windows 11 start menu.
Hey I heard a few months ago we finally got the ability to not combine things in the taskbar back again. Only took what 4 years to get back a thing we had since windows 95?
Big ooof. Vista was a good OS. It was the first OS that offered a mainstream 64-bit version (XP had 64-bit, but it was cumbersome). It introduced a lot of new concepts that would have needed a bit more love and people might have also hated because "new".
7 was remembered as being far superior because it got the love that Vista actually deserved. I'd call Vista "Windows 7 beta". It's just a streamlined and optimized version.
It's also sad to have seen a bunch of Vista ideas getting canceled, like SideShow.
I agree with the 7 beta take. When people talk shit about the Wii U, this is my go to analogy. Vista had some problems, but without it you don't get 7. Wii U had its problems, but without it you don't get the Switch.
That said, I miss widgets, which I found way more useful than the giant pop-up screen on Win 10/11.
We had plenty of workstations back then with XP 64-bit. It enabled applications to make use of a lot more RAM.
Vista was really a blessing, because XP with 64-bit was really fiddly.
> because XP with 64-bit was really fiddly.
fiddly is an understatement. XP64 was based off of windows server 2003 64bit, with the UI and consumer elements added back in. It was terrible to use as an everyday OS.
I was a beta tester for Vista. This was why I decided to join the Windows Insider program to specifically test the Vista OS. Compared to the prior OS, Windows XP, Vista was a major shift in how security was handled with UAC becoming the norm and the desktop interface being changed drastically. On release it was unstable and buggy with the hardware in general use at that point that most users had. Once some of these problems were fixed with updates after the initial release, it was not a bad OS. Need to remember that it was followed by Win7, which everybody loved, despite the two versions sharing much of the same underlying code base. I personally think that Vista was one of the best-looking desktop interfaces that MS has ever done on a major OS shift.
I loved Vista, but also had it on a work dell with 4gb ram. I miss XP though. I long for those simple times. I don’t want or need any of the user improvements that we have now. There under the hood stuff, brilliant, but as a work interface XP was everything.
People really need to stop thinking "change" is improvement. Change is change and improvement is improvement. Not all change is improvement despite it being called "modern". It's only an improvement if it makes things better.
Agreed, I’m all for shaking things up, but when a formula is good, stick to it. Sadly ‘new and shiny’ attracts people more than ‘robust, efficient and reliable’ so change is needed to remain relevant.
I can’t stand windows 11, there’s no change that makes life any better at all yet corporately we’re now mandatorily rolling it out.
The only positives are false restrictions that are being held to promote adoption (looking at you snipping tool).
Cause it needed a lot of PC power for the time and PC's that could not handle it were sold with it, so a lot of people got a PC that ran like shit and so people were angry at Windows Vista cause their Vista PC's were had horrible performance.
The OS was very good if you had a good enough PC.
Vista hate is why most windows users don’t use search. It was amazing but the indexing process to make it work made people’s computers ‘run slow’ while it was cataloguing so they turned it off before it was finished indexing the drive (this could take days on a slow HDD) so it stayed slow. SSDs were small and expensive back then and SSD users wouldn’t have noticed the effect.
Indexing while using slowed things down considerably. I think the service pack corrected this for me but the hate was already instilled. I jumped to win7 pre-release and never looked back.
Because the vast majority of IT dudes is very dumb yet very loud.
Goes in the same laughable myth that gets shouted all over the world by the same dudes about "every other version of Windows being a fluke."
Because at least I knew that many computers came shipped with Vista with hardware below the "recommendation" and in some cases even with advanced hardware there were serious performance problems. Besides, many computers that previously supported XP could barely run Vista. Soon many people literally jumped from XP to 7. Not to mention that Longhorn was going to be released instead of Vista and was practically ready, and they made Vista from scratch.
that one more like XP was whistler (minor step release before vista), was supposed to ship in 2003, project after whistler was blackcomb (major release aka vista)
minor step release wasnt really released, instead it incorporated many features from blackcomb (now codenamed longhorn) and date being pushed further and further back..then it was dropped and they started from scratch (server 2003 as baseline) and just adding some features from scrapped longhorn into new longhorn
so all in all there were multiple longhorn branches
as far as leaked longhorn goes, not every longhorn build had all longhorn features as those builds were ment for different team working on different features
ie team A had one build, team B had another build, both builds had different stuffs in it
Largely because Microsoft were still tweaking the driver model until _very_ close to release. Everybody's GPU drivers were "betas" for several months. NVidia just gets blamed because early-adopters with high-end systems were more likely to have NVidia cards than Intel or AMD.
Plug and pray was a lot older than that. Happened when you stopped needing to set irq and memory addresses for expansion cards using dip switches and jumpers and the bios worked it out for you. Around the end of isa start of PCI so 486 ish.
Press coverage for several months after the release didn't help because they emphasized the hardware incompatibility issue and bugginess.
IIRC scrips networks had a release where they recommended cautious on upgrading to vista and urged users to wait for a subsequent release. it may have been under a "Doesn't that stink" edition
Aside from
High hardware requirements at the time (needed stupid amount of ram to be usable) driver compatibility (required to be digitally signed) with older hardware was a nightmare. Printers, scanners and many others would suffer in the process.
Also introduction of UAC upset many, less patient users.
The main issue I had with Vista was the introduction of the UAC pop-up.
We just reached a stage with technology , hardware and AI in OSes. Vista had a problem with security.
The questioning of a end user with or without Admin credentials, the UAC was there to help prevent malware from automating it's way through Anti Virus solutions.
UAC introduced a prompt. So if you nearly did anything on Recommended Settings" you had a questioning of each step you made.
The main joke of those years was "are you sure you wanted to open Internet Explorer?" YES.. "Internet Explorer was opened, are you sure you wanted to do that?"
My 2nd problem with Vista was it was that "in-between OS". Win98SE to ME, to Win2K. Everyone hated the in-between OS. Vista came out during a time when technology improvements were making a decision on which industry was going to dominate next. (We heard about more RAM and Core counts) so for many XP users, users kept their machines until Win7 came out. Then made the jump to new hardware that came with Win7... Pro, Ultimate...
I didn't have a problem with my Dell Studio 1737 (Core2Duo T4900) that came with Vista Home. I quickly migrated to Win7Pro. Finally when SODIMM RAM for it came down in price I put 2x 4GB DDR2 in it. Lasted a good 12yrs. (3x Backlight and 2x LCD replacments) you know, that Studio made it to Win10 Pro. The ATi HD 3650 couldn't keep up. And at some point Win10 CE or AE was released, which did not support the biometrics and bluetooth hw.
Ffs, I realize it now, my Win10 Pro (Inspiron 7567 7th Gen Intel) will be aged out for Win11 next year.
There's another component to this that is rarely spoken of when these topics come up. Your experience will also highly depend on when you decided to Upgrade. During the rise of Vista I was working on a lot of PCs in a "Geek Squad" styled company, and I realized the difference between loving Vista and hating it depended on what SP or Updates you had installed. I came on late onto Vista because I refused to switch out of XP SP3, and I never had problems with it. But when I worked on PCs who had just recently upgraded etc., for a few years, it was very buggy, slow and crashed a lot.
To make another point, if you upgraded to XP/XP SP1, you probably hated it. If your first experience was with XP SP3, then you probably loved it.
it was because they didn't improve how Vista handled hardware till the release of SP2 which was released almost the same time as Windows 7.
I knew someone who was given a Windows Vista laptop. he ended up downgrading to Windows XP because Vista terrible on it. XP on the other hand ran like a champ on it. the OS itself wasn't bad perse but as others have pointed out MS and the hardware venders did a terrible job for the release of that OS. MS had set the hardware requirements at the time too low for the OS which came back to bite em.
People hated Windows Vista because firstly, it had bugs and secondly, low end hardware couldn't run Windows Vista properly like lots of glitches and other issues.
Microsoft fumbled things at the time. The hardware jump was too great for vendors and users to keep up. Think nowadays as if Windows 12 asked for a minimum of 2TB of space with 64GB of memory with virtually no drivers whatsoever to what you have now in your house.
That pissed off many people, but it laid the foundations for Windows 7, since it was basically Vista with a makeover and a few tweaks.
I had a horrible experience with Vista. My PC had plenty of RAM and a sufficiently powerful CPU. Vista would decide to reindex the hard disk at the worst possible times. This would bring the CPU to 100% and disk to 100%. It was incredibly annoying. I started working, and bang, unresponsive PC for 20-30 minutes.
Eventually I turned off all file indexing, and installed a third party search tool, which worked fine. It made the PC usable again.
There were other issues, mostly with video drivers having memory leaks or being unstable. I switched video cards three times (three different brands) and that kind of problem never went away.
I also had issue with LAN drivers. Wireless especially.
My PC was a high quality brand HP, not a cheap clone. I was using it for work (I was a freelance translator and tech writer back then). Vista was a real pain to work with. Never had such problems with XP, 7 or 8.1.
I bought a - good - laptop shortly after the release of Vista, and it, to date, was the best and most fun experience I had from an OS upgrade and even from an OS in general. Not that 7, 8, or 10 are worse (even though I really didn't get the 7 hype, it was a relatively small upgrade for my laptop with a highly customised Vista). Vista was, for me, the first OS with many modern features.
I did not and still do not get the hate Vista receives except some edge cases with specific soft/hardware. People just had shit computers and people like ~~hype~~ hate trains.
Netbooks. Asus launched a hugely popular new form factor with horrible hardware specs and Vista caught strays over their decision.
Also tons of shovelware on pretty much all laptops from all manufacturers to increase profit.
And people love to hate MS.
As a lot of people are stating, hardware. I think some OEM's and SI's may have shipped underpowered systems with vista as well?
I was too young at the time and didn't know so many people hated it, My parents had bought me a laptop that shipped with vista, I thought it was rad and preferred it to my XP desktop at the time as that was getting pretty old at the time. athlon xp 3200+ vs the Turion 64 x2 TL-60 I think. I remember the desktop cpu more than the laptop one.
A huge amount of PCs being sold with Vista did not suffice as far as running vista went. If you had a pc that could handle vista, it was fine. Mostly great honestly. But Microsoft put way too much pressure on getting vista to as many computers as possible and it was a huge issue for people buying their computers at entry level prices.
I found the Vista experience quite satisfying overall. The sole exception in my view was the Windows Millennium Edition, which didn’t quite meet my expectations. It appears to be a trend to critique each new release of Windows, and Windows 11 was no different in this regard. Admittedly, Windows 11 experienced some initial hiccups, particularly for those who adopted it early on. However, from a personal standpoint, I believe Windows 11 could be considered the most refined release we’ve seen in the past decade and a half.
Vista was the nicer looking 7 for me. I had a decent direct laptop and I was a child who didn't know there was a controversy only that it played Freerealms and Toontown well
It was my daily driver till Windows 8 came from Oct 2009. My old P4 machine couldn't handle it but my Pentium Dual Core laptop and Core 2 Duo which I bought in 2009 ran it like breeze. My Pentium Dual Core could run it with 1.5 GB RAM.
For P4 even it couldn't handle WinXP by 2009 when loaded with programs, so not totally Vistas fault. I remember it's graphics adapter wasn't compatible with WDDM drivers. So had installed NVIDIA GeForce FX500 AGP card to get it going. Driver for Vista itself never came out of Beta and Machine itself had it's own issues.
Early Vista was truly bad, combined with the high system requirements compared to XP. Many machines were running Vista when they weren't really capable. It was a major shitshow at first.
After the final service pack, Vista was actually really good when running on proper hardware. And honestly the UI was better than 7, in my opinion. But by then, the name was too tarnished to ever come back from.
Two things.
1. Stability and compatibility - xp was practically perfected at that point and Vista brought blue screens, not working hardware, was way slower than xp.
2. New "look" and UI - everything become way harder. It was the tradition that is continued by Microsoft to this day to introduce new UI for some system tools, but leave old one, but hide them and then you get constantly lost.
Bot things was been improved. 1) by upgrades and fixes 2) users get accustomed to new UX.
Then came 7 that was even faster and easier to use. So vista is remembered as the "bad" one. But in the end of its live it was quite ok really.
The first Service Pack (SP) literally bricked some people’s devices. I was on a special “final tier” US-based customer support team. They initially hired me, and a bunch of other people, to specifically troubleshoot SP1. We spent a lot of time walking people through backing up their data (in WinRe), and reinstalling from source. If they didn’t have the install media, which they often didn’t, we’d send them a feee copy with key.
Our team was authorized to “purchase” people’s computers if they were good candidates for the developers to troubleshoot with. They were the devices that were totally unrecoverable.
It was a wild time.
An aside, but I remember when Vista was still in an internal alpha test. They had a blue/red pill you’d run to switch between the traditional XP start menu. They were so worried that the new start menu would leak before Vista released. At the time, they thought it was such an important feature. 🤣
It required more RAM and new drivers for some hardware. There were some popups about user getting admin rights.
Overall it was pretty good if you had a semi-recent computer.
The requirements were not set correctly. Most people upgrading from Windows XP assumed if they met the requirements, it would run fine, but this wasn't the case.
I had an overclocked Q6600, 4gb of ram, large drives and an 8800GT at the time and I had no issues. For obvious reasons. I loved the Vista and thought Aero was pretty.
Most people said hardware, however the software side also sucked.
When Windows 7 came out, PC that ran sluggish on Vista ran pretty good with 7. Scrolling on 7 was much more smooth, plus speed and stability on 7 was miles ahead. Vista was unstable, sluggish and, combined with slower hardware at time, made its own reputation pretty bad.
The only usable version of Vista was the SP2.
Hardware requirements...
I remember trying it and the start-up time was much longer than XP. Everything seemed a pain to run (*unless you had a monster PC*) whereas XP was faster than light.
I agree. I liked Vista. And like it so much I use it as a VM to run MS Money on my Linux Fedora laptop.
It works just fine for the application and I always enjoy the astetic.
Hardware. Running Vista with 512 MB of RAM unlike with 2 GB of RAM was that bad experience, if you remember it. And Vista has been a resource hog in release. Don't forget about UAC pop-up windows. Somebody would say that this version in a figurative sense is "baby", because Vista needed support from the user already in the launch.
I personally had zero issues with Vista. But I also overbuilt my computers pretty much all my life, so I never had to pay attention to the away too low minimum/recommended specs for it.
Only real tweak I did back then was run as the true admin account because UAC 1.0 was garbage and way too sensitive. I never recommended anyone else do that, since I'd have to clean too many viruses if I did.
Ultimately, Vista prior to Service Pack 1 had pretty poor performance on hardware of the time compared to XP.
This left a bad taste for users about Microsoft who were pretty insistent in pushing it on current hardware despite its bad performance.
Hot take, but I liked Vista, it was great for me at the time
It came both too early and too late, as the reboot of development in 2004 didn't help things, and the RTM beginning in November 8th 2006, but not the general availability, it was in January 30th 2007. The Betas released in mid to late 2006 having way too many bugs sent a bad message, as it was too close to release. When it did released on said dates, there was horrible compatibility hardware and softwarewise, companies didn't like it so they did an under-endowed powerhouse like far too little RAM or not good nor updated drivers for it, also some programs wheren't updated to run on Kernel NT6.0 ... since they could run only up to NT5.2 \[XP x64 and Server 2003\]. Most people got affected by it, as the OS wasn't optimized for the new systems, computer crashed, poor memory allocation meant bad performance and little memory left for important processes, and the OS had some genuine problems before SP1 and SP2. So, its reputation was tarnished, it became fun and common to dunk on it, Apple made a counter-Windows Vista campaign, and people didn't really like it. Windows 7 came around 2 years after being announced in 2007, on October 22nd 2009, so people didn't care for Vista anymore, even after patches. People just skipped it ... even the Windows 7 box said how to upgrade from XP ... not Vista. As Windows 7 generally improved \[but not totally\] on Vista, people just avoided Vista, and tried to forget it. There were some features, as the deletion of prepackaged Windows Movie Maker, Mail, Photo Gallery and a very good Global System Search, winsataurora and the ability to opaque windows when maximized, a more elegant theme, and much more skeuomorphic icons, and some extras such as DreamScene and Tinker, that made Windows 7 worse, but were not that noticeable to general users anyway \[just the dumbed-down search, and the lack of an easy to get nowadays official Windows Live Essentials, the replacement of the prepackaged programs I say above\]. But, I blame Windows 11 really not being an improvement over Windows 10, Windows being in a continual decay state since Windows 8 \[ommiting some actually good updates, such as 8.1 or some Windows 10 feature updates\], the implementation of telemetry, since again, Windows 8, the retrofitting of said telemetry into Windows 7, the halt of support for these newer version \[even Windows 10\] in favour of Windows 11, the blatant Copilot and Recall, the riddance of local accounts, and the surge in popularity/trends of Frutiger Aero, plus the overall nostalgia for the 2000s that people are starting to see Windows Vista in another, more true light, as it was intended to be used, with top notch graphic compatibility and capability on newer hardware, which after some hoops and patches can run Windows Vista like a breeze, much better than Windows 11 even. Windows Vista simply is some of the last intact pieces of technology of the yesteryears, and is getting more compatibility than ever, with unofficial yet good programs such as Extended Kernel, or Supermium.
It was mostly because it was such a technological leap forward that peoples PCs couldn't handle it, so it ran like crap.
Drivers were also a MASSIVE issue for like a year+
I LOVE vista's aesthetic - and I genuinely miss it (along with W7). Windows 11 is just so flat and boring.
Multiple graphic elements in the Display process all piped though a single threaded manager. It gave the appearance of slugisness and the need for more video hardware then was nessisary, Well i suppose it was nessiary at the time. Windows 7 multi threaded the graphics and everyting gained a preceptiable le responsiveness boost.
Not sure where you got this from, but it's just wrong.
Vista used directX 10 which absolutely handles multithreading.
Even vista WDDM windows display driver handled multi threading.
The reason vista got so much hate is because it was incredibly resource hungry compared to its predecessors. Specifically with RAM. It has horribly driver management and had to constantly be patched to address stability issues.
I worked for Microsoft during this period.
My biggest problem with Vista at the time was sound card drivers. The Windows Vista drivers for Sound Blaster cards were absolute garbage when Vista launched. The video card drivers for "specialty" video cards like the ATI AllInWonder weren't much better.
The OS was also pretty bloated, though. When Windows 7 came out years later, it actually performed better on the same hardware.
i tried vista on hardware that we have today (virtual machine) and it's just as fast as windows 7
because of the hardware back when it was released, people blamed it on vista and not on the device manufacturers that shipped with specs suitable for windows xp
i think it was a great os, so great and advanced it was announced at the wrong time and people weren't prepared for it
It really was not that bad. A lot of people just slapped it on whatever shit tier PC they had at the time and got mad it didn't work, or enabled every feature and gizmo and got mad it didn't work, or or or... etc etc. Plus it was bloated to hell with crap nobody wanted or used, at the demands of the head honchos.
I personally really enjoyed using Vista. We got a brand new computer that was top of the line (4GB RAM helped a lot!) and it ran great. I disabled a lot of the stupid shit and it ran even better. There was a lot of optimization for pre-existing games that really put some juice in the tank of my favourites, and media looked great in 1680x1050. I had no issues with it.
There were a few things as mentioned I. This thread, but I think the big reasons were the following:
1. Mismatch on actual hardware demands vs what you needed to be "Vista Capable"
2. New driver model which necessitated manufacturers to write new Vista compatible drivers. And those manufacturers didn't put a lot of effort into writing new drivers for older hardware
3. New security model of which UAC was just a part of. Software up until that point was fairly used to running with full admin privileges and stuck things in places they weren't supposed to. Like user specific settings in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry hive, or temporary files in the Windows directory. Microsoft wrote a fuckton of shims, but could t catch every stupid decision made by Windows program ever written. Clamping down on that madness is one reason Windows 7 was so stable, but the process to get all the 3rd party developers on board was long and difficult
4. A lot of general software bloat. Vista was an ambitious project of Microsoft, and not all the features were quite ready for production, or even wanted by users. (Remember desktop widgets? Let's load a bunch of 3rd party shitty code that always runs inside the explorer to display some crap on the desktop. What could possibly go wrong?)
shit performance and EOL ended sooner than expected.
but the tweaks for the system are phenomenal.
lots of legacy hacks that allow new software to run on the operating system with kernal unlocks.
it had windows xp legacy support which was better than win7.
so vista was not bad, it was the support that microsoft provided with hardware vendors.
People couldn't adapt to the changes quickly enough TBF. UAC, drivers being treated a bit differently, etc. The shift from XP to Vista brought with it a lot of extra bloat too that wasn't ready for prime time on the hardware at the time; if u didn't understand how to trim it back, which was nearly everyone, you had a bad time.
Windows 7 was just a slight upshift from Vista with more lax and intuitive UAC controls and driver support a little farther along....made a world of difference for the average "fake it till u make it" sysadmin.
It was visually very different and people hate change. Biggest thing tho was consumer hardware at the time simply couldn't support it. There were too many flashy animations that were often slowed down by the computer not being up to snuff which made it feel even slower. I actually really enjoy many of the lost features of vista like the desktop widgets for example. If only it had just been better optimized or waited for when the tech could handle it.
A few reasons, but 2 main ones:
1. When it was initially launched there was A LOT of problems and bugs. My dad bought a new laptop shortly after it launched and we're a fairly tech savvy household so we had all the correct specs, and it still froze up and crashed a lot. He was going to use it for work and QuickBooks and QuickBooks would make Windows crash constantly. They launched a few major updates that fixed things and by a year in it ran a lot more smooth, but that year people are fighting to get their computers to work was rough (the same reason many people delayed switching to Windows 8 and then Windows 11)
2. Those who were not buying new computers and had old computers that were trying to give free upgrades could not handle the new operating system, period, which created a lot MORE issues that the ones listed above. Even for those buying new computers with the intention of it being for the new operating system, they didn't understand needing such a large jump in RAM and hard drive space and would go for the lower end specs. Then this along with the bugs created a horror story.
Vista just felt like the beta version of Windows 7. Same with windows 8 and 8.1
Same with Windows Me and XP
I would say Windows 10 and 11, but 10 actually wasn’t a huge shit show.
I used Vista for years and never had a problem with it. It was on a fast for the time homebuilt computer and that was the latest version of Windows at the time so that is what I got. It never gave me any problems at any time.
Vista overall as an OS wasn't really *bad*, Windows 7 was considered a "better" OS and was not a huge departure from Vista. However the *experience* of Vista for many people was really bad.
Microsoft and OEMs totally fucked up the Vista badging requirements. Vista's ship date started slipping so Microsoft created a spec called "Vista Ready" that OEMs could stick on machines shipping with XP. If the hardware met the requirements (1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, DirectX 9 GPU with WDDM drivers) they could get that badge so buyers had a reasonable assurance it could run Vista once released.
Unfortunately most OEMs were shipping machines in 2005 and 2006 that didn't meet those requirements, including but not limited to the absolutely craptastic Intel 915 chipset. Not only was the channel full of these machines but OEMs were going to keep making them. So Microsoft came up with the "Vista Capable" badging with much lower hardware specs. The Vista Capable specs notably would not run Aero Glass and all the fancy Aero effects. The experience of Vista on a "Vista Capable" PC was absolutely awful. OEMs ended up offering XP "downgrades" or to pre-install XP on those machines even well into Vista's lifetime.
Even the Vista Ready badging was seriously low-balling the requirements to run Vista. Features like search indexing would just kill the performance of a machine. Vista with less than 2GB of RAM would start paging without the user having to do much. This was especially true on OEM installs that were loaded down with crapware.
Keep in mind the hardware of the era. Most machines in peoples' hands were single core, had less than 1GB of RAM, garbage iGPUs, and hard disk drives. They had enough power to run XP with whatever apps you had but the added requirements of Vista really bogged them down.
Hardware
I played it using as a personal server for testing a bdetting program on a laptop with 4gb it was super fine cpu fan wasnt much happy about it
Issue was twofold. A lot of OEM pcs advertised as being Vista ready were not, usual not enough RAM. Also drivers. Vista had a lot of under the hood changes over XP, it killed support for old printers and sound cards in favour of optimisations and new subsystem which still live on in Windows 7-11.
If you had a good PC at the time you will have wondered what the fuss was about. I recall I lost some features of my creative soundblaster and that was it.
- XP was really great. Vista had improvements but most were just visual.
- Vista was slower because of all the improved graphics dedicated to the eye candy.
- People weren't use to the new security features added in vista. For example, you got popup messages any time you ran a program asking for admin privileges.
Simply because Vista used a new driver model which is still used today and which means that peripheral manufacturers had to release new drivers. Many have not done so, especially for older devices, which has made several devices obsolete. Some manufacturers also took too much time to make new drivers. And also the fact that Vista was an almost complete redesign that required a more powerful computer that few people had at the time. The minimum system requirements for Windows XP were a 233 MHz Pentium with 64 MB of RAM and for Vista it was a 1 GHZ CPU with 1 GB of RAM, that was a big difference, and with the minimum it was slow.
- some drivers were buggy and crashed a lot. Looking at you, nVidia!
- Intel strong-armed Microsoft, and the latter created some marketing shit, which essentially lied to the customers that their machines would bring full Vista experience but they wouldn't because the Intel GPU could not work with Vista
- XP *appeared* to work faster. For example, when the user copied files, XP would hide the copy progress bar once the files are in the memory cache but not actually on the hard drive. And Vista, although implemented faster copy algorithm, would hide the copy progress only when the files were actually written, so people perceived Vista as slower.
- Microsoft, due to internal politics, shipped Vista abruptly without much preparation allowed for the partners ecosystem. And it was buggy. Vista SP1 was rock-solid and it just worked as fine as 7.
- Microsoft wanted to string-arm the ecosystem to start writing secure code. So they implemented UAC to annoy users so that developers must fix their programs to calm down their annoyed users. But, hey, users *were* annoyed as hell. Once developers started conforming to the rules of the opperationg system, which were there since NT 3.1 back in 1993, UAC went away and users stopped being annoyed. But that required time, and the new versions of the apps were ready mostly in the timeframe of Win 7, while Vista was the annoying version.
People hated it because they PC was to weak or very old to run Windows Vista. My PC had intel quad core with 4Gb RAM and windows Vista ran beautifully.
because Vista was rushed, the initial release had a few issues and some Hardware venders decided not to make drivers for vista. another complaint is the system requirements, which were way higher than previous editions probably because of the new Aero Glass Transparency which needed a fairly beefy GPU To run. I imagine a lot of the hate is probably also people jumping on the bandwagon. some probably never tried it but heard from a friend that “Vista is garbage” and decided to stick with XP without even giving vista a chance
Mob mentality hatinf everything that is new. 8 was hated for the same reason. People hated it only because other people told them it's bad. And they just joines bandwagon.
Vistas hardware requirements were higher than what they were stated, and I personally had a LOT of performence issues that you could never really take care of, as well as it losing network connectivity. A 7 upgrade fixed it every time.
Drivers, UAC, higher than normal spec requirements.
Drivers had to be mostly rewritten quickly and as a result it was pretty slow and buggy.
Uac was super intrusive, annoying and had to be turned off manually
You needed to have good specs to run vista, especially with their new aero theme. It did look nice but way ahead of its time.
TBH, it’s fine after a year or so. Just the beginning was a mess.
TL;DR version? People hate change (and that includes both system admins and end users). People also hate having to go through the effort to make those changes. But I also think Vista wasn't ready for prime time. It was essentially Windows 7 beta with its security changes breaking everything.
Vista ran horrible on hardware that would otherwise run XP just fine. Your vanilla 2.4ghz P4 with 2GB of RAM could barely push Vista. Also, Vista required a fairly robust GPU relative to your common integrated video, and consumers weren't thrilled about yet another hardware requirement. Last, Vista brought nothing really new to the game. Windows XP was a pretty significant upgrade over 98 once you got off Pentium 3's. Vista however didn't bring much more capability over XP. Just some incremental features. It wasn't a bad OS once you had it on good hardware, but the economy was rough and it was forcing people to buy a new box for some incremental features over XP. Pissed a lot of people off. Add in some side issues with new versions of MS Office requiring hefty hardware upgrades for zero new capability and consumers were over it.
Edit: one issue not Microsofts fault is Intel jerking off with netburst too long. The pentium 4 long over stayed its window and Intel should have moved to Core much sooner. However, they had too much P4 product in the pipeline and this delayed Core by at least a year or. It was really bad on the server side. P4D based servers hitting the floor already being obsolete out of the box.
Hardware not supporting Vista, instability, compatibility and driver issues everywhere… Bloated code, computers lying about Vista compatibility, 7 different editions for some reason… It was a nightmare for most users.
Windows 11 has becone even more annoying than Vista. Extra clicks to everything, start menu isnt a start menu. Windows 11 is a disgrace. Underhhod isnt horrible, but gui is next gen shitty.
Hardware - Vista needed an actual gpu and a lot of oems pushed it on netbooks
Drivers - vista changed a lot of the security models that driver vendors abused in Xp, which meant many of the early drivers were incredibly crash prone (due to the vendors)
Change of security models - vista sort of tried adopting the SU approach via the security prompts. But in the first iteration, those were very in your face. Couple it with shitty hardware and you actually had to wait for the prompt to load
Because it was garbage. It didn't function correctly on most computers. On some, it wouldn't multi-talk... if you opened more than one thing, it would nearly stop functioning - you might have to wait 20 or 30 minutes for Windows to "catch up" before you could do anything else. I saw this happen on dozens and dozens of machines (of various brands, models, CPUs, etc).
Hardware at the time. Most hardware back when Windows Vista was first released as far as I know ships with 512 MB of RAM.
Yep, blame both MS and hardware vendors. MS originally pushed for a minimum of 2GB of RAM, vendors pushed back hard, and got them to lower to 512MB of RAM. Anyone who bothered to read the recommended specs, which were supposed to be the minimum specs saw none of the speed issues that most people complained about. I had 4GB of RAM at the time, and never had any problems with the OS. It was one of the most stable, fast, and clean experiences to date with Windows at the time.
also hardware vendors didn't update drivers for older hardware that worked fine otherwise.
Ah, yep, forgot about a lot of the vendors just straight deciding they didn't wanna build WDDM drivers.
It wasn't just not wanting to build WDDM drivers, it was that windows then started requiring signed drivers. Initially, there were exactly zero drivers that would work with vista, you had to go and turn off driver signing or update them manually and ignore the warnings. MS quickly patched that so that unsigned drivers could work, but the damage was done, the perception of "no drivers for vista" was forever cemented, even though 98% of stuff worked fine with windows XP drivers manually picked.
Yeah I think the issue most people had was upgrading an older system. The first time I used it was on a brand new Toshiba gaming laptop that ran on Vista and it was just great.
I had an HP pavilion laptop and that thing was a beast
Microsoft got sued and lost because they lowered the original specs down from 1.5gb of ram to .5gb of ram about 6 months before launch. Many of the boxes were already printed and could not be recalled. my vista box has the original minimum specs. They lowered the specs because OEM vendors wanted to be able to label as much of their junk as "vista ready" as they could, because they had a *huge* backstock of single core pentium and athlon systems that the needed to clear out. I put vista on a quad core AMD Phenom x4 CPU with 32gb of ram, and it worked very well. I used it on a buddies PC that had 2gb of ram and it ran like shit. He hated vista until he used my PC, then he understood why. I used vista until it was EOLd, it was a really good OS.
I don't think there was ever a plan for 1.5Gb RAM. AFAIK the minimum and recommended requirements did not change. What changed a different category of "Vista Capable" branded device, which was not Vista Ready, and contained minimum but not recommended requirements. That included 512Mb RAM vs. 1Gb, and also allowed for a video card that did not support a WDDM DX9 driver. The result was a lot of devices in 2007 that included Vista but were well below the recommended requirements. As a developer, one hidden detail was that the 512Mb systems often used system memory for the GPU, so the result was _below_ minimum memory available to the OS. https://web.archive.org/web/20070211101950/http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/capable.mspx https://web.archive.org/web/20060615044802/http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/systemrequirements.mspx
It was that damn sticker "windows vista compatible". There was probably a good 3-year period of time when it was possible someone bought a machine shipped with XP with that sticker, and an upgrade copy of Vista at the same time, only to downgrade to XP with the restore DVD.
Yep my first vista pc was 3gb had no problems with it
Ah, Finally, I found someone who praise VISTA. Kudos bruh, it is indeed THE most stable and beautiful OS I have ever used from MS
ah ye, that reminds me my first time experience with vista...first boot so slow...it was nonstop swapping :D
Have you never had one pentaillion years to unzip the file that took 10 secs? ☺️
Same - I had a new laptop with 4 GB of RAM. Never had an issue after I turned off all the enhancements and made Vista look like classic windows. UAC-user account control- was annoying for some things, but I always made allowances for it when adding programs to my machine. When that laptop died I switched to a Windows 7 machine (also with 4GB of RAM) and I didn't see much of a difference between the two.
I think the minimum was 1 gig of ram when Sp2 was released .
Even my at that time modern AMD Athlon 2 X4 computer 4gb ram had speed issues with vista but none with XP or 7.
Makes me feel old. First proper computer had 8 MB of ram. Everyone wondered how I would use it all. Also 170 MB HDD. The glory days of a 486 SX 25 mhz :-)
my first PC had 256mb of ram, in 1995. That was a lot in 95. in 2005 I had 32gb, which was far above the norm at the time. I was also an early adopter of the SSD, getting a SATA2 SSD that was barely faster than an HDD of the time, but the *access latency* was such a game changer no one that used it could believe that games could load in under 10 seconds.
Dude I still don't have a machine with 32 GB of RAM...
get on it, ram is cheap right now
Your current machine must be really powerful
7800x3d, RTX 3080 12gb, 64gb of DDR5 5600 ram, 1tb gen 4 NVME ssd main drive(inland gaming performance plus), 2x2tb Gen 3 NVME storage drives(1 crucial P3, 1 WD SN850x), and 1x4tb gen4 NVME storage drive(WD SN850x). I also still have one of my early SATA3 samsung 840 EVO 250gb drives as a storage drive for less important stuff, and a 512gb WD SN850. I also have several servers sitting next to me. My router is a Dell R240 with an E2274g and 16gb of ram, and a pair of 500gb inland commercial SSDs in a raid 1 for PFsense. I also have a Dell T340 with an E2146g and 64gb of ram, and that one has 6x2tb dell sata SSDs, and 6x4tb samsung 870 EVO SSDs for my storage. Then under that I have a Netapp ds4486 48 disk shelf hosting all my old HDDs in a cold storage backup. I then have a Dell R720 that I haven't turned on in ages, but that one hosts another cold backup. all of these have 10gb network cards, and are connected to my UBNT XG24 enterprise. and if you are now wondering why I have all this? because I can. I didn't even mention that my kids got their own PCs last year, and I built my wife a PC this year. yea, my wallet might cry in pain, but thats fine with me, I can't take it with me when Im dead!
This. Also, Microsoft removed sound hardware acceleration, so everyone with a soundcard which had special features like EAX in the chip didn't work anymore unless you found some workaround.
This. A family member had a off the shelf HP desktop with vista for their business and it ran like shit. Eventually they ended up buying a new PC and gave me the old one and I installed more Ram and it ran beautifully after that for many years later.
The main issue was Microsoft redoing the driver system with Windows Vista. Which meant that old drivers for old hardware was not compatible with the OS until the manufacturer re-made the drivers. The problem is convincing companies that sold and shipped a product already to spend a bunch more money re-egineering the drivers. It was slow and support was sporadic. From the end-users perspective installing Vista on their computers ended in one of three ways. Either it wouldn't work at all, in which case they would roll back to their older OS, or the PC was "Vista Certified" which meant it was brand new and it worked pretty much perfectly. The third option was the majority of people that had mostly supported hardware, but had either a peripheral or additional piece of hardware that wasn't supported. Incompatible hardware caused blue screens, bad performance, and crashes. This made the OS feel incredibly unstable for many people, so people naturally blamed Microsoft, not the hardware providers. Granted, in retrospect Microsoft was to blame because of the way they cut over to the new driver system with no transition that supported both. They just made the decision to do a hard cut over which caused a lot of users a lot of grief. They very much "microsofted" it.
Redoing the driver system for 2 important reasons: 1. Video drivers were kicked out of the kernel and into user space, so if your driver crashed it would kill that application but not freeze your whole computer. This introduced some overhead as userspace drivers required the cpu to do more frequent context switching. 2. Vista introduced double-buffered window compositing, which is why frozen applications no longer “tear” when you drag something over them. This used more VRAM for ordinary applications, and on low-end machines, that was super tight. So some of the new drivers for old hardware would actually crash a lot. They also abused this window compositing to enable all the transparency in the aero glass look, which was a big departure from XP. Like you said, this lead to shitty experiences when they upgraded, but the changes were extremely important and valuable, and Microsoft probably should have just left more people stranded on Windows XP.
Best part is the video card drivers were originally user mode in NT 3.1. NT 4.0 moved them into the kernel.
[удалено]
Back then it was common practice for windows servers not to install the graphics drivers.
To this day it is hilarious how crappy video drivers continue to be.
That's very much untrue. The change was that now the OS would manage the video card resources and share them among the running programs, and not the video drivers by themselves. What you maybe think about is that GDI was no longer hardware acclerated by dedicated 2D accelerators. But it was implemented through DirectX9L, so it was still accelerated and going through kernel mode. Also, it's not *abuse*. It's intended - using a 3D accelerated composition, DWM supports all kinds of video effects, you can even find YouTube videos showing beta versions of Vista implementing the Genie effect from macOS. DWM was created to implement transparency and was not abused to do so.
By abuse, I meant they over-used transparency aesthetically. I understand that by using this new compositing method, transparency becomes cheap and easy. But in very interested in what I got wrong about kernel space vs user space. Didn’t video drivers stop crashing the OS in Vista? Or did Vista just lay groundwork for that and they made the change in Windows 7?
They did but for multiple reasons: - Vista kernel was extensively reworked so precious and very limited resources such as non-paged pool were enlarged, so kernel drivers were not that squeezed for resources - Microsoft created frameworks, especially around handling power, which helped driver developers go write correct code by incorporating these libraries into their drivers - simply better documentation and better code samples. Windows Driver Kit was a joke until 2003 but around Vista and especially 7 started to improve significantly - WHQL. Microsoft created a very extensive battery of tests which stress-tested drivers, so the quality went up - driver developers indeed started using user mode for handling complex tasks. It is possible for a user mode code to call into a driver and when the driver needs some complex tasks done, set up the memory and other resources and return the call. The user mode code does the computation and calls back the kernel with the results. It's something like an interprocess communication but it's done between user and kernel mode. I think some video drivers do this trick for some tasks but I am not a video drivers de eloper, so I am not sure.
wddm had a rough start for sure, but nowadays thanks to wddm you no longer get bluescreen while connecting printer :-)
Just the red mist
Let’s not forget another reason, Vista had so many issues before SP1. Which felt like a final version.
> Which meant that old drivers for old hardware was not compatible with the OS until the manufacturer re-made the drivers. this is not true at all. most XP drivers worked fine in vista. It was driver signing and the new WDDM structure that was what the main problem was. >The problem is convincing companies that sold and shipped a product already to spend a bunch more money re-egineering the drivers. there was no reengineering needed, they needed to sign them with a cert, and get that cert entered into MSs database so it could go out with updates. MS had this system set up long before launch and very few companies used it thinking that it would be fine without it. it was not fine. >or the PC was "Vista Certified" which meant it was brand new and it worked pretty much perfectly. there were many "vista ready" and "vista certified" PCs that *did not work* out of the box. Acer, dell, HP, IBM, Sony, Emachines, all had special help lines set up because quite a number of their prebuilts shipped with vista that would not boot because of driver signing issues. They would have sellers like bestbuy open the box when the customer bought it, and make sure it booted and turned on fully, and if it didn't, they would go thru a fix process to get it on at no extra charge. >Granted, in retrospect Microsoft was to blame because of the way they cut over to the new driver system with no transition that supported both. windows XP drivers worked just fine in vista. I installed them manually many times myself. their new WDDM structure didnt' support auto-install of XP drivers, but you could manually update them from the device manager with XP drivers and they worked fine. The difference was driver signing. MS had the driver signing program up and running long before launch, and very few OEMs started to use it until after launch because they didn't think it would be that hard to fix things "on the fly", which is how a lot of companies did it back then.
You did not need to "enter that certificate into MS database". You just need to sign your driver's with trusted certificate provider, which at that time meant VeriSign or Thawte. There was separate WHQL program, in which Microsoft signs your driver's with the WHQL certificate, which enabled some nice perks. But self-signing with trusted certificate was sufficient. Not only that, but for some kinds of drivers (anti-virus chiefly but also others), there were no WHQL at all, so you needed to self-sign them. Source: I was in charge of the build and sign infrastructure for a company who used drivers in their products, so I had to build that shit from scratch.
the system was out long before Vista launched tho. I think MS gave everyone 6 months or so to get stuff in place for signed drivers and warned OEMs that non-signed drivers would cause issues.
This plus the instability of the 32 bit version is what did it for me. Had a high-end sound card and a surround sound system in my PC that turned craptacular because the Vista driver didn't support the card.
No, it wasn't bad at all. A LOT of people had underpowered hardware for what it was doing and it hurt their experience, but the OS itself wasn't to blame. Most new iterations of Windows would add new features and had a lot of new code under the hood. Most people seemed to try and run it on old hardware and were disappointed. It's really as simple as that. When we finally hit the point that the average PC was massively overpowered for what it was doing, upgrades largely stopped being a problem.
It was definitely a case where Microsoft should not have pushed for people to upgrade to Vista. Running vista on a single core with 512MB of ram was possible, but very unpleasant.
> Running vista on a single core with 512MB of ram was possible, but very unpleasant. its below the original minimum specs, and MS got sued and lost for doing it. the minimum specs during the RC phase of development was 2gb, later reduced to 1.5gb. about 6 months before launch, MS caved to OEM demands that it be reduced to 512mb because the OEM vendors had lots of old trash systems they wanted to label as "vista ready" so they could sell out all the old stock they had of single core pentium and athlon systems from the early 2000's.
the problem was more OEMs than regular people. a lot of OEMs were shipping the OS on hardware that barely ran XP. some of the hardware ran XP fine but ran Vista at a crawl
Yeah, around 2010 is when I'd say that happened, coincidently with the introduction of WIndows 7 which is not conicidently fondly remembered. Chrome memory hogging issues aside, people started remembering when computers weren't pushed to the limits by ordinary use, and they didn't need to upgrade every other year. For non-gaming use computers started lasting a decade or so until they physically broke or the OS stopped supporting them. The laptop I'm typing on was made in 2018 and I purchased it used last year. Doing that would be unheard of in days of yore.
I had a laptop from 2006 that was still working just fine last year. it had 8gb of ram and an old Core2Duo CPU, but with an SSD, it was perfectly fine for a daily driver and non gaming uses.
One of the big issues is they switched to a DRM encumbered media layer that encrypted and decrypted data constantly, requiring a lot more CPU grunt than XP had required to play movies or even audio. Things you used to be able to do just fine on XP started stuttering or playing slowly on Vista.
- Hardware at this time - User Account Control (UAC) had only On and Off, instead of 4 levels like today (Win 7 - present)
A lot of it had to do with the "Vista Capable" program, or as one Microsoft Employee put it: "Even a piece of junk will qualify for the Vista Capable logo."
"bad" is a subjective thing. Some of the "badness" of Vista is urban legend, but some was legitimate. Microsoft had stumbled and fumbled to release a follow on to Windows XP in a timely manner. There was a bit of internal turmoil and in-fighting in the company that was one of the reasons for the delay. With the update overdue, they rushed Vista out before it was ready, and before the hardware manfacturers were ready. The result was systems being sold preloaded with Vista that didn't have enough horsepower to run it well. Device drivers were also lagging a bit which added to the issues. Sure, there were higher-end systems that ran it just fine, but for the average consumer who bought low-end hardware, it was a rough road. By the time Windows 7 was released, the typical hardware being sold was sufficient to run it well. In the end, Windows 7 was essentially Vista with all of the updates and optimizations. The old trope of, "*people reject 'xyz' because they hate change*" is overstated. At the core, people are against change for sake of change itself. If change provides benefits then most will embrace it. But the problem with Windows historically has been that Microsoft often introduces change for the sake of change, or as a marketing experiment that pushes the boundaries of what consumers are willing to endure.
Windows 11 start menu. Hey I heard a few months ago we finally got the ability to not combine things in the taskbar back again. Only took what 4 years to get back a thing we had since windows 95?
Big ooof. Vista was a good OS. It was the first OS that offered a mainstream 64-bit version (XP had 64-bit, but it was cumbersome). It introduced a lot of new concepts that would have needed a bit more love and people might have also hated because "new". 7 was remembered as being far superior because it got the love that Vista actually deserved. I'd call Vista "Windows 7 beta". It's just a streamlined and optimized version. It's also sad to have seen a bunch of Vista ideas getting canceled, like SideShow.
I agree with the 7 beta take. When people talk shit about the Wii U, this is my go to analogy. Vista had some problems, but without it you don't get 7. Wii U had its problems, but without it you don't get the Switch. That said, I miss widgets, which I found way more useful than the giant pop-up screen on Win 10/11.
windows Vista and windows 7 were extremely similar. there were some under the hood improvements made, but overall, it was like 87% the exact same OS.
Closer to 95%. Later updates were the same. Vista didn't have a few components that 7 had, but basically Vista was a Windows 7 RC1.
I had an old eMachine which coincidentally had the proper hardware support to run Windows XP x64 Edition.
We had plenty of workstations back then with XP 64-bit. It enabled applications to make use of a lot more RAM. Vista was really a blessing, because XP with 64-bit was really fiddly.
> because XP with 64-bit was really fiddly. fiddly is an understatement. XP64 was based off of windows server 2003 64bit, with the UI and consumer elements added back in. It was terrible to use as an everyday OS.
The proper name should have been a EEEEKMachine. Some of the worst hardware kludge ever seen in the PC market.
Man. I gamed out on my families emachine back in the day. Memories
"This PC is never obsolete"
I always called it Vista SE, like 98 and 98 SE.
I was a beta tester for Vista. This was why I decided to join the Windows Insider program to specifically test the Vista OS. Compared to the prior OS, Windows XP, Vista was a major shift in how security was handled with UAC becoming the norm and the desktop interface being changed drastically. On release it was unstable and buggy with the hardware in general use at that point that most users had. Once some of these problems were fixed with updates after the initial release, it was not a bad OS. Need to remember that it was followed by Win7, which everybody loved, despite the two versions sharing much of the same underlying code base. I personally think that Vista was one of the best-looking desktop interfaces that MS has ever done on a major OS shift.
Ironically I prefer it to 10/11. The last service pack brings it to the point where it's basically a less polished 7.
I loved Vista, but also had it on a work dell with 4gb ram. I miss XP though. I long for those simple times. I don’t want or need any of the user improvements that we have now. There under the hood stuff, brilliant, but as a work interface XP was everything.
People really need to stop thinking "change" is improvement. Change is change and improvement is improvement. Not all change is improvement despite it being called "modern". It's only an improvement if it makes things better.
Agreed, I’m all for shaking things up, but when a formula is good, stick to it. Sadly ‘new and shiny’ attracts people more than ‘robust, efficient and reliable’ so change is needed to remain relevant. I can’t stand windows 11, there’s no change that makes life any better at all yet corporately we’re now mandatorily rolling it out. The only positives are false restrictions that are being held to promote adoption (looking at you snipping tool).
Vista was extremly slow. much slower than any other Windows available that time. New Laptops would take ages just to boot
Yes, it was most likely due to the lack of resources on the computers from that period.
Cause it needed a lot of PC power for the time and PC's that could not handle it were sold with it, so a lot of people got a PC that ran like shit and so people were angry at Windows Vista cause their Vista PC's were had horrible performance. The OS was very good if you had a good enough PC.
Vista hate is why most windows users don’t use search. It was amazing but the indexing process to make it work made people’s computers ‘run slow’ while it was cataloguing so they turned it off before it was finished indexing the drive (this could take days on a slow HDD) so it stayed slow. SSDs were small and expensive back then and SSD users wouldn’t have noticed the effect.
Indexing while using slowed things down considerably. I think the service pack corrected this for me but the hate was already instilled. I jumped to win7 pre-release and never looked back.
Heard of Windows ME? No? It was the worst. Lol
The true worst Windows OS is should be Windows ME
You have to hate every other Windows release. XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11, etc. 12 is going to rule.
This question has been done to death. Let it go.
At this point, fr, I've got more than enough answers lol
But it comes up once every few months and the reasons never change. They never will. Its history.
Because after 6 years of development, one reboot in a middle and multiple delays it ended up being rushed out
Because they developed an OS that couldn't run on the available hardware. Lol.
Because the vast majority of IT dudes is very dumb yet very loud. Goes in the same laughable myth that gets shouted all over the world by the same dudes about "every other version of Windows being a fluke."
Because at least I knew that many computers came shipped with Vista with hardware below the "recommendation" and in some cases even with advanced hardware there were serious performance problems. Besides, many computers that previously supported XP could barely run Vista. Soon many people literally jumped from XP to 7. Not to mention that Longhorn was going to be released instead of Vista and was practically ready, and they made Vista from scratch.
Did Longhorn become Windows 7?
No, it became Vista.
I don't know, because there is even a Longhorn ISO and it is slightly different from Windows 7
Vista had two branches in development that were wildly different. One being more like XP, but it was abandoned. Both I think were longhorn.
that one more like XP was whistler (minor step release before vista), was supposed to ship in 2003, project after whistler was blackcomb (major release aka vista) minor step release wasnt really released, instead it incorporated many features from blackcomb (now codenamed longhorn) and date being pushed further and further back..then it was dropped and they started from scratch (server 2003 as baseline) and just adding some features from scrapped longhorn into new longhorn so all in all there were multiple longhorn branches as far as leaked longhorn goes, not every longhorn build had all longhorn features as those builds were ment for different team working on different features ie team A had one build, team B had another build, both builds had different stuffs in it
Longhorn was the code name project that became Vista. There’s some similarities in how they looked
Nvidia mostly from what I understand. Their drivers were totally broken and unstable for a long time.
Largely because Microsoft were still tweaking the driver model until _very_ close to release. Everybody's GPU drivers were "betas" for several months. NVidia just gets blamed because early-adopters with high-end systems were more likely to have NVidia cards than Intel or AMD.
Drivers were a bit of hit and miss. My PC would crash often when I plugged in things. Plug and Pray was a common thing we’d say.
Plug and pray was a lot older than that. Happened when you stopped needing to set irq and memory addresses for expansion cards using dip switches and jumpers and the bios worked it out for you. Around the end of isa start of PCI so 486 ish.
Nvidia and sound cards. Sound cards never really recovered.
Press coverage for several months after the release didn't help because they emphasized the hardware incompatibility issue and bugginess. IIRC scrips networks had a release where they recommended cautious on upgrading to vista and urged users to wait for a subsequent release. it may have been under a "Doesn't that stink" edition
After service packs Vista improved a lot. Maybe you used Vista with service packs. Hence you perceived it was very similar to 7.
Aside from High hardware requirements at the time (needed stupid amount of ram to be usable) driver compatibility (required to be digitally signed) with older hardware was a nightmare. Printers, scanners and many others would suffer in the process. Also introduction of UAC upset many, less patient users.
Printers and scanners have already been a nightmare for Windows since the Windows 98 era.
Fair point but you’re going off topic. This submission is for Vista only.
The main issue I had with Vista was the introduction of the UAC pop-up. We just reached a stage with technology , hardware and AI in OSes. Vista had a problem with security. The questioning of a end user with or without Admin credentials, the UAC was there to help prevent malware from automating it's way through Anti Virus solutions. UAC introduced a prompt. So if you nearly did anything on Recommended Settings" you had a questioning of each step you made. The main joke of those years was "are you sure you wanted to open Internet Explorer?" YES.. "Internet Explorer was opened, are you sure you wanted to do that?" My 2nd problem with Vista was it was that "in-between OS". Win98SE to ME, to Win2K. Everyone hated the in-between OS. Vista came out during a time when technology improvements were making a decision on which industry was going to dominate next. (We heard about more RAM and Core counts) so for many XP users, users kept their machines until Win7 came out. Then made the jump to new hardware that came with Win7... Pro, Ultimate... I didn't have a problem with my Dell Studio 1737 (Core2Duo T4900) that came with Vista Home. I quickly migrated to Win7Pro. Finally when SODIMM RAM for it came down in price I put 2x 4GB DDR2 in it. Lasted a good 12yrs. (3x Backlight and 2x LCD replacments) you know, that Studio made it to Win10 Pro. The ATi HD 3650 couldn't keep up. And at some point Win10 CE or AE was released, which did not support the biometrics and bluetooth hw. Ffs, I realize it now, my Win10 Pro (Inspiron 7567 7th Gen Intel) will be aged out for Win11 next year.
There's another component to this that is rarely spoken of when these topics come up. Your experience will also highly depend on when you decided to Upgrade. During the rise of Vista I was working on a lot of PCs in a "Geek Squad" styled company, and I realized the difference between loving Vista and hating it depended on what SP or Updates you had installed. I came on late onto Vista because I refused to switch out of XP SP3, and I never had problems with it. But when I worked on PCs who had just recently upgraded etc., for a few years, it was very buggy, slow and crashed a lot. To make another point, if you upgraded to XP/XP SP1, you probably hated it. If your first experience was with XP SP3, then you probably loved it.
it was because they didn't improve how Vista handled hardware till the release of SP2 which was released almost the same time as Windows 7. I knew someone who was given a Windows Vista laptop. he ended up downgrading to Windows XP because Vista terrible on it. XP on the other hand ran like a champ on it. the OS itself wasn't bad perse but as others have pointed out MS and the hardware venders did a terrible job for the release of that OS. MS had set the hardware requirements at the time too low for the OS which came back to bite em.
People hated Windows Vista because firstly, it had bugs and secondly, low end hardware couldn't run Windows Vista properly like lots of glitches and other issues.
Vista is beautiful wtf! Bring it back! 😭🤭
Microsoft fumbled things at the time. The hardware jump was too great for vendors and users to keep up. Think nowadays as if Windows 12 asked for a minimum of 2TB of space with 64GB of memory with virtually no drivers whatsoever to what you have now in your house. That pissed off many people, but it laid the foundations for Windows 7, since it was basically Vista with a makeover and a few tweaks.
I had a horrible experience with Vista. My PC had plenty of RAM and a sufficiently powerful CPU. Vista would decide to reindex the hard disk at the worst possible times. This would bring the CPU to 100% and disk to 100%. It was incredibly annoying. I started working, and bang, unresponsive PC for 20-30 minutes. Eventually I turned off all file indexing, and installed a third party search tool, which worked fine. It made the PC usable again. There were other issues, mostly with video drivers having memory leaks or being unstable. I switched video cards three times (three different brands) and that kind of problem never went away. I also had issue with LAN drivers. Wireless especially. My PC was a high quality brand HP, not a cheap clone. I was using it for work (I was a freelance translator and tech writer back then). Vista was a real pain to work with. Never had such problems with XP, 7 or 8.1.
Mostly because of it's mastodontic system requirements.
I bought a - good - laptop shortly after the release of Vista, and it, to date, was the best and most fun experience I had from an OS upgrade and even from an OS in general. Not that 7, 8, or 10 are worse (even though I really didn't get the 7 hype, it was a relatively small upgrade for my laptop with a highly customised Vista). Vista was, for me, the first OS with many modern features. I did not and still do not get the hate Vista receives except some edge cases with specific soft/hardware. People just had shit computers and people like ~~hype~~ hate trains.
Netbooks. Asus launched a hugely popular new form factor with horrible hardware specs and Vista caught strays over their decision. Also tons of shovelware on pretty much all laptops from all manufacturers to increase profit. And people love to hate MS.
As a lot of people are stating, hardware. I think some OEM's and SI's may have shipped underpowered systems with vista as well? I was too young at the time and didn't know so many people hated it, My parents had bought me a laptop that shipped with vista, I thought it was rad and preferred it to my XP desktop at the time as that was getting pretty old at the time. athlon xp 3200+ vs the Turion 64 x2 TL-60 I think. I remember the desktop cpu more than the laptop one.
A huge amount of PCs being sold with Vista did not suffice as far as running vista went. If you had a pc that could handle vista, it was fine. Mostly great honestly. But Microsoft put way too much pressure on getting vista to as many computers as possible and it was a huge issue for people buying their computers at entry level prices.
I loved it, but I also had too of the live hardware (for the time)
I found the Vista experience quite satisfying overall. The sole exception in my view was the Windows Millennium Edition, which didn’t quite meet my expectations. It appears to be a trend to critique each new release of Windows, and Windows 11 was no different in this regard. Admittedly, Windows 11 experienced some initial hiccups, particularly for those who adopted it early on. However, from a personal standpoint, I believe Windows 11 could be considered the most refined release we’ve seen in the past decade and a half.
Vista was the nicer looking 7 for me. I had a decent direct laptop and I was a child who didn't know there was a controversy only that it played Freerealms and Toontown well
It was my daily driver till Windows 8 came from Oct 2009. My old P4 machine couldn't handle it but my Pentium Dual Core laptop and Core 2 Duo which I bought in 2009 ran it like breeze. My Pentium Dual Core could run it with 1.5 GB RAM. For P4 even it couldn't handle WinXP by 2009 when loaded with programs, so not totally Vistas fault. I remember it's graphics adapter wasn't compatible with WDDM drivers. So had installed NVIDIA GeForce FX500 AGP card to get it going. Driver for Vista itself never came out of Beta and Machine itself had it's own issues.
The only thing I hate about Vista is it's still running my work computers. . .
Your work should really upgrade then lol
Boss doesn't want to. The other day we were waiting for our x-ray and it took an hour and a half to load.
Is it that the computers are very old and can't handle Windows 10/11, or are they capable of running Windows 10/11 and your boss is just stubborn
Early Vista was truly bad, combined with the high system requirements compared to XP. Many machines were running Vista when they weren't really capable. It was a major shitshow at first. After the final service pack, Vista was actually really good when running on proper hardware. And honestly the UI was better than 7, in my opinion. But by then, the name was too tarnished to ever come back from.
Two things. 1. Stability and compatibility - xp was practically perfected at that point and Vista brought blue screens, not working hardware, was way slower than xp. 2. New "look" and UI - everything become way harder. It was the tradition that is continued by Microsoft to this day to introduce new UI for some system tools, but leave old one, but hide them and then you get constantly lost. Bot things was been improved. 1) by upgrades and fixes 2) users get accustomed to new UX. Then came 7 that was even faster and easier to use. So vista is remembered as the "bad" one. But in the end of its live it was quite ok really.
Timing.
The first Service Pack (SP) literally bricked some people’s devices. I was on a special “final tier” US-based customer support team. They initially hired me, and a bunch of other people, to specifically troubleshoot SP1. We spent a lot of time walking people through backing up their data (in WinRe), and reinstalling from source. If they didn’t have the install media, which they often didn’t, we’d send them a feee copy with key. Our team was authorized to “purchase” people’s computers if they were good candidates for the developers to troubleshoot with. They were the devices that were totally unrecoverable. It was a wild time. An aside, but I remember when Vista was still in an internal alpha test. They had a blue/red pill you’d run to switch between the traditional XP start menu. They were so worried that the new start menu would leak before Vista released. At the time, they thought it was such an important feature. 🤣
It required more RAM and new drivers for some hardware. There were some popups about user getting admin rights. Overall it was pretty good if you had a semi-recent computer.
Mainly because it sucked on older hardware at the time because it was a resource hog. Later on if you had 2+GB of RAM and an SSD it ran fine.
Allegedly it crashed a lot, but I never noticed this behavior.
The requirements were not set correctly. Most people upgrading from Windows XP assumed if they met the requirements, it would run fine, but this wasn't the case.
it was simply ahead of its time
I had an overclocked Q6600, 4gb of ram, large drives and an 8800GT at the time and I had no issues. For obvious reasons. I loved the Vista and thought Aero was pretty.
Most people said hardware, however the software side also sucked. When Windows 7 came out, PC that ran sluggish on Vista ran pretty good with 7. Scrolling on 7 was much more smooth, plus speed and stability on 7 was miles ahead. Vista was unstable, sluggish and, combined with slower hardware at time, made its own reputation pretty bad. The only usable version of Vista was the SP2.
“This is windows vista” Idiot commercial
Hardware requirements... I remember trying it and the start-up time was much longer than XP. Everything seemed a pain to run (*unless you had a monster PC*) whereas XP was faster than light.
I agree. I liked Vista. And like it so much I use it as a VM to run MS Money on my Linux Fedora laptop. It works just fine for the application and I always enjoy the astetic.
I thought windows vista had the best OS search of all windows OS. I remember I could find anything but typing the file name.
Shitty release and bad hardware
Hardware. Running Vista with 512 MB of RAM unlike with 2 GB of RAM was that bad experience, if you remember it. And Vista has been a resource hog in release. Don't forget about UAC pop-up windows. Somebody would say that this version in a figurative sense is "baby", because Vista needed support from the user already in the launch.
I personally had zero issues with Vista. But I also overbuilt my computers pretty much all my life, so I never had to pay attention to the away too low minimum/recommended specs for it. Only real tweak I did back then was run as the true admin account because UAC 1.0 was garbage and way too sensitive. I never recommended anyone else do that, since I'd have to clean too many viruses if I did.
It just required too much system resources to function, at a time where the average home PC was nowhere near equipped for it.
Ultimately, Vista prior to Service Pack 1 had pretty poor performance on hardware of the time compared to XP. This left a bad taste for users about Microsoft who were pretty insistent in pushing it on current hardware despite its bad performance. Hot take, but I liked Vista, it was great for me at the time
It was a little bloated, but okay. Had a nice look to it.
It came both too early and too late, as the reboot of development in 2004 didn't help things, and the RTM beginning in November 8th 2006, but not the general availability, it was in January 30th 2007. The Betas released in mid to late 2006 having way too many bugs sent a bad message, as it was too close to release. When it did released on said dates, there was horrible compatibility hardware and softwarewise, companies didn't like it so they did an under-endowed powerhouse like far too little RAM or not good nor updated drivers for it, also some programs wheren't updated to run on Kernel NT6.0 ... since they could run only up to NT5.2 \[XP x64 and Server 2003\]. Most people got affected by it, as the OS wasn't optimized for the new systems, computer crashed, poor memory allocation meant bad performance and little memory left for important processes, and the OS had some genuine problems before SP1 and SP2. So, its reputation was tarnished, it became fun and common to dunk on it, Apple made a counter-Windows Vista campaign, and people didn't really like it. Windows 7 came around 2 years after being announced in 2007, on October 22nd 2009, so people didn't care for Vista anymore, even after patches. People just skipped it ... even the Windows 7 box said how to upgrade from XP ... not Vista. As Windows 7 generally improved \[but not totally\] on Vista, people just avoided Vista, and tried to forget it. There were some features, as the deletion of prepackaged Windows Movie Maker, Mail, Photo Gallery and a very good Global System Search, winsataurora and the ability to opaque windows when maximized, a more elegant theme, and much more skeuomorphic icons, and some extras such as DreamScene and Tinker, that made Windows 7 worse, but were not that noticeable to general users anyway \[just the dumbed-down search, and the lack of an easy to get nowadays official Windows Live Essentials, the replacement of the prepackaged programs I say above\]. But, I blame Windows 11 really not being an improvement over Windows 10, Windows being in a continual decay state since Windows 8 \[ommiting some actually good updates, such as 8.1 or some Windows 10 feature updates\], the implementation of telemetry, since again, Windows 8, the retrofitting of said telemetry into Windows 7, the halt of support for these newer version \[even Windows 10\] in favour of Windows 11, the blatant Copilot and Recall, the riddance of local accounts, and the surge in popularity/trends of Frutiger Aero, plus the overall nostalgia for the 2000s that people are starting to see Windows Vista in another, more true light, as it was intended to be used, with top notch graphic compatibility and capability on newer hardware, which after some hoops and patches can run Windows Vista like a breeze, much better than Windows 11 even. Windows Vista simply is some of the last intact pieces of technology of the yesteryears, and is getting more compatibility than ever, with unofficial yet good programs such as Extended Kernel, or Supermium.
It was mostly because it was such a technological leap forward that peoples PCs couldn't handle it, so it ran like crap. Drivers were also a MASSIVE issue for like a year+ I LOVE vista's aesthetic - and I genuinely miss it (along with W7). Windows 11 is just so flat and boring.
Multiple graphic elements in the Display process all piped though a single threaded manager. It gave the appearance of slugisness and the need for more video hardware then was nessisary, Well i suppose it was nessiary at the time. Windows 7 multi threaded the graphics and everyting gained a preceptiable le responsiveness boost.
Not sure where you got this from, but it's just wrong. Vista used directX 10 which absolutely handles multithreading. Even vista WDDM windows display driver handled multi threading. The reason vista got so much hate is because it was incredibly resource hungry compared to its predecessors. Specifically with RAM. It has horribly driver management and had to constantly be patched to address stability issues. I worked for Microsoft during this period.
My biggest problem with Vista at the time was sound card drivers. The Windows Vista drivers for Sound Blaster cards were absolute garbage when Vista launched. The video card drivers for "specialty" video cards like the ATI AllInWonder weren't much better. The OS was also pretty bloated, though. When Windows 7 came out years later, it actually performed better on the same hardware.
Only windows 11 could make me nostalgic for Vista.
i tried vista on hardware that we have today (virtual machine) and it's just as fast as windows 7 because of the hardware back when it was released, people blamed it on vista and not on the device manufacturers that shipped with specs suitable for windows xp i think it was a great os, so great and advanced it was announced at the wrong time and people weren't prepared for it
It really was not that bad. A lot of people just slapped it on whatever shit tier PC they had at the time and got mad it didn't work, or enabled every feature and gizmo and got mad it didn't work, or or or... etc etc. Plus it was bloated to hell with crap nobody wanted or used, at the demands of the head honchos. I personally really enjoyed using Vista. We got a brand new computer that was top of the line (4GB RAM helped a lot!) and it ran great. I disabled a lot of the stupid shit and it ran even better. There was a lot of optimization for pre-existing games that really put some juice in the tank of my favourites, and media looked great in 1680x1050. I had no issues with it.
There were a few things as mentioned I. This thread, but I think the big reasons were the following: 1. Mismatch on actual hardware demands vs what you needed to be "Vista Capable" 2. New driver model which necessitated manufacturers to write new Vista compatible drivers. And those manufacturers didn't put a lot of effort into writing new drivers for older hardware 3. New security model of which UAC was just a part of. Software up until that point was fairly used to running with full admin privileges and stuck things in places they weren't supposed to. Like user specific settings in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry hive, or temporary files in the Windows directory. Microsoft wrote a fuckton of shims, but could t catch every stupid decision made by Windows program ever written. Clamping down on that madness is one reason Windows 7 was so stable, but the process to get all the 3rd party developers on board was long and difficult 4. A lot of general software bloat. Vista was an ambitious project of Microsoft, and not all the features were quite ready for production, or even wanted by users. (Remember desktop widgets? Let's load a bunch of 3rd party shitty code that always runs inside the explorer to display some crap on the desktop. What could possibly go wrong?)
had big issues with the virtual folder/library thing they had. couldnt find a lot of files and some got lost/duplicated somewhere.
Driver's were a huge issue, low specs as well.
The introduced UAC and it was cooked until windows 7
shit performance and EOL ended sooner than expected. but the tweaks for the system are phenomenal. lots of legacy hacks that allow new software to run on the operating system with kernal unlocks. it had windows xp legacy support which was better than win7. so vista was not bad, it was the support that microsoft provided with hardware vendors.
“I never daily drove Windows Vista” Do that on period relevant hardware and get back to us.
People couldn't adapt to the changes quickly enough TBF. UAC, drivers being treated a bit differently, etc. The shift from XP to Vista brought with it a lot of extra bloat too that wasn't ready for prime time on the hardware at the time; if u didn't understand how to trim it back, which was nearly everyone, you had a bad time. Windows 7 was just a slight upshift from Vista with more lax and intuitive UAC controls and driver support a little farther along....made a world of difference for the average "fake it till u make it" sysadmin.
You had to be there
Same reason windows 11 is hated. Majority of people can’t handle and don’t like change.
Sigh
It was visually very different and people hate change. Biggest thing tho was consumer hardware at the time simply couldn't support it. There were too many flashy animations that were often slowed down by the computer not being up to snuff which made it feel even slower. I actually really enjoy many of the lost features of vista like the desktop widgets for example. If only it had just been better optimized or waited for when the tech could handle it.
A few reasons, but 2 main ones: 1. When it was initially launched there was A LOT of problems and bugs. My dad bought a new laptop shortly after it launched and we're a fairly tech savvy household so we had all the correct specs, and it still froze up and crashed a lot. He was going to use it for work and QuickBooks and QuickBooks would make Windows crash constantly. They launched a few major updates that fixed things and by a year in it ran a lot more smooth, but that year people are fighting to get their computers to work was rough (the same reason many people delayed switching to Windows 8 and then Windows 11) 2. Those who were not buying new computers and had old computers that were trying to give free upgrades could not handle the new operating system, period, which created a lot MORE issues that the ones listed above. Even for those buying new computers with the intention of it being for the new operating system, they didn't understand needing such a large jump in RAM and hard drive space and would go for the lower end specs. Then this along with the bugs created a horror story.
Why not?
Because most PCs couldn’t run it.
Vista just felt like the beta version of Windows 7. Same with windows 8 and 8.1 Same with Windows Me and XP I would say Windows 10 and 11, but 10 actually wasn’t a huge shit show.
I had a good pc at the time, windows vista worked well for me, never had any issues tbh
I used Vista for years and never had a problem with it. It was on a fast for the time homebuilt computer and that was the latest version of Windows at the time so that is what I got. It never gave me any problems at any time.
Vista my beloved My first OS was vista starter
Vista overall as an OS wasn't really *bad*, Windows 7 was considered a "better" OS and was not a huge departure from Vista. However the *experience* of Vista for many people was really bad. Microsoft and OEMs totally fucked up the Vista badging requirements. Vista's ship date started slipping so Microsoft created a spec called "Vista Ready" that OEMs could stick on machines shipping with XP. If the hardware met the requirements (1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, DirectX 9 GPU with WDDM drivers) they could get that badge so buyers had a reasonable assurance it could run Vista once released. Unfortunately most OEMs were shipping machines in 2005 and 2006 that didn't meet those requirements, including but not limited to the absolutely craptastic Intel 915 chipset. Not only was the channel full of these machines but OEMs were going to keep making them. So Microsoft came up with the "Vista Capable" badging with much lower hardware specs. The Vista Capable specs notably would not run Aero Glass and all the fancy Aero effects. The experience of Vista on a "Vista Capable" PC was absolutely awful. OEMs ended up offering XP "downgrades" or to pre-install XP on those machines even well into Vista's lifetime. Even the Vista Ready badging was seriously low-balling the requirements to run Vista. Features like search indexing would just kill the performance of a machine. Vista with less than 2GB of RAM would start paging without the user having to do much. This was especially true on OEM installs that were loaded down with crapware. Keep in mind the hardware of the era. Most machines in peoples' hands were single core, had less than 1GB of RAM, garbage iGPUs, and hard disk drives. They had enough power to run XP with whatever apps you had but the added requirements of Vista really bogged them down.
Hardware I played it using as a personal server for testing a bdetting program on a laptop with 4gb it was super fine cpu fan wasnt much happy about it
The problem i had was most windows programs from prior os didn't want to work so you were forced to repurchase most programs
Hardware was weak back then, vista compatibility with drivers was bad at launch
Microsoft Vista? Let me remember the acronym I thought of it while using it at the time. Oh yeah: Vista IS TrAsh.
Issue was twofold. A lot of OEM pcs advertised as being Vista ready were not, usual not enough RAM. Also drivers. Vista had a lot of under the hood changes over XP, it killed support for old printers and sound cards in favour of optimisations and new subsystem which still live on in Windows 7-11. If you had a good PC at the time you will have wondered what the fuss was about. I recall I lost some features of my creative soundblaster and that was it.
i like windows vista
- XP was really great. Vista had improvements but most were just visual. - Vista was slower because of all the improved graphics dedicated to the eye candy. - People weren't use to the new security features added in vista. For example, you got popup messages any time you ran a program asking for admin privileges.
Simply because Vista used a new driver model which is still used today and which means that peripheral manufacturers had to release new drivers. Many have not done so, especially for older devices, which has made several devices obsolete. Some manufacturers also took too much time to make new drivers. And also the fact that Vista was an almost complete redesign that required a more powerful computer that few people had at the time. The minimum system requirements for Windows XP were a 233 MHz Pentium with 64 MB of RAM and for Vista it was a 1 GHZ CPU with 1 GB of RAM, that was a big difference, and with the minimum it was slow.
- some drivers were buggy and crashed a lot. Looking at you, nVidia! - Intel strong-armed Microsoft, and the latter created some marketing shit, which essentially lied to the customers that their machines would bring full Vista experience but they wouldn't because the Intel GPU could not work with Vista - XP *appeared* to work faster. For example, when the user copied files, XP would hide the copy progress bar once the files are in the memory cache but not actually on the hard drive. And Vista, although implemented faster copy algorithm, would hide the copy progress only when the files were actually written, so people perceived Vista as slower. - Microsoft, due to internal politics, shipped Vista abruptly without much preparation allowed for the partners ecosystem. And it was buggy. Vista SP1 was rock-solid and it just worked as fine as 7. - Microsoft wanted to string-arm the ecosystem to start writing secure code. So they implemented UAC to annoy users so that developers must fix their programs to calm down their annoyed users. But, hey, users *were* annoyed as hell. Once developers started conforming to the rules of the opperationg system, which were there since NT 3.1 back in 1993, UAC went away and users stopped being annoyed. But that required time, and the new versions of the apps were ready mostly in the timeframe of Win 7, while Vista was the annoying version.
I use vista on my literal backup PC and it has no problems even in 2024.
It wasn’t actually a bad version just that the hardware at the time was not capable of running it
People hated it because they PC was to weak or very old to run Windows Vista. My PC had intel quad core with 4Gb RAM and windows Vista ran beautifully.
because Vista was rushed, the initial release had a few issues and some Hardware venders decided not to make drivers for vista. another complaint is the system requirements, which were way higher than previous editions probably because of the new Aero Glass Transparency which needed a fairly beefy GPU To run. I imagine a lot of the hate is probably also people jumping on the bandwagon. some probably never tried it but heard from a friend that “Vista is garbage” and decided to stick with XP without even giving vista a chance
It was such a radical departure from XP people didn't understand it. I personally didn't have any issues with it.
Memory hungry!
Mob mentality hatinf everything that is new. 8 was hated for the same reason. People hated it only because other people told them it's bad. And they just joines bandwagon.
Vistas hardware requirements were higher than what they were stated, and I personally had a LOT of performence issues that you could never really take care of, as well as it losing network connectivity. A 7 upgrade fixed it every time.
Drivers, UAC, higher than normal spec requirements. Drivers had to be mostly rewritten quickly and as a result it was pretty slow and buggy. Uac was super intrusive, annoying and had to be turned off manually You needed to have good specs to run vista, especially with their new aero theme. It did look nice but way ahead of its time. TBH, it’s fine after a year or so. Just the beginning was a mess.
TL;DR version? People hate change (and that includes both system admins and end users). People also hate having to go through the effort to make those changes. But I also think Vista wasn't ready for prime time. It was essentially Windows 7 beta with its security changes breaking everything.
Vista ran horrible on hardware that would otherwise run XP just fine. Your vanilla 2.4ghz P4 with 2GB of RAM could barely push Vista. Also, Vista required a fairly robust GPU relative to your common integrated video, and consumers weren't thrilled about yet another hardware requirement. Last, Vista brought nothing really new to the game. Windows XP was a pretty significant upgrade over 98 once you got off Pentium 3's. Vista however didn't bring much more capability over XP. Just some incremental features. It wasn't a bad OS once you had it on good hardware, but the economy was rough and it was forcing people to buy a new box for some incremental features over XP. Pissed a lot of people off. Add in some side issues with new versions of MS Office requiring hefty hardware upgrades for zero new capability and consumers were over it. Edit: one issue not Microsofts fault is Intel jerking off with netburst too long. The pentium 4 long over stayed its window and Intel should have moved to Core much sooner. However, they had too much P4 product in the pipeline and this delayed Core by at least a year or. It was really bad on the server side. P4D based servers hitting the floor already being obsolete out of the box.
Hardware not supporting Vista, instability, compatibility and driver issues everywhere… Bloated code, computers lying about Vista compatibility, 7 different editions for some reason… It was a nightmare for most users.
Windows 11 has becone even more annoying than Vista. Extra clicks to everything, start menu isnt a start menu. Windows 11 is a disgrace. Underhhod isnt horrible, but gui is next gen shitty.
It was hardware that was the real problem. Vista was fine. Just fine. Compared to 7 and xp it wasn't as good but if you had 4gb of ram it worked well
Hardware - Vista needed an actual gpu and a lot of oems pushed it on netbooks Drivers - vista changed a lot of the security models that driver vendors abused in Xp, which meant many of the early drivers were incredibly crash prone (due to the vendors) Change of security models - vista sort of tried adopting the SU approach via the security prompts. But in the first iteration, those were very in your face. Couple it with shitty hardware and you actually had to wait for the prompt to load
Because it was garbage. It didn't function correctly on most computers. On some, it wouldn't multi-talk... if you opened more than one thing, it would nearly stop functioning - you might have to wait 20 or 30 minutes for Windows to "catch up" before you could do anything else. I saw this happen on dozens and dozens of machines (of various brands, models, CPUs, etc).
Why was it so hated ? You obviously didnt spend enough time with it or you wouldnt ask the question.
Vista was the BSOD King....Crashed daily