Everywhere you go if you so much as mention Windows Vista you'll probably receive the following:

>vista

Yes, the general consensus throughout the internet seems to be that Windows Vista is a steaming pile of rubbish that exists merely to be slandered from time to time.

However, as hard as I find I can find no legitimate reason for people to think this.

"But Tandyman-the-amazing!" You say, "Vista sold horribly and people hated it!"

So... exactly why does that mean the OS itself is bad? Allow me to explain.

REASONS VISTA HAS A BAD REPUTATION:

1. Horrible driver support.

Explain to me how this is a fault of Microsoft and/or the OS. No, this is the fault of AMD, NVidia, ATi, Intel, Broadcom, etc.. It is noones fault but the makers of the hardware in question that no drivers existed at the time for Vista.

One reason people still try to blame this on Vista is because it uses a new driver model; WDDM. Well, we couldn't stick with one driver model forever, which brings me to..

2. It's different.

Well of course it's different, numbnuts. Look at the difference between Win2k's UI and XP's UI and try to tell me they're more similar than XP/Vista are to each other. Vista is less of a departure from "the norm" than XP was, and people *LOVED* XP (even though it was a horrible piece of rubbish before SP2 rolled around).

3. "Bloat"

Install Vista. Look at how much RAM it uses. For me, the answer is 652MB, or nearly twice what XP SP3 uses on first boot. However, this is pre-SP Vista. Something that rustles my jimmies to no end is people that completely ignore the existence of two service packs for Windows Vista that tremendously increase performance. If I were to judge XP in the same manner, I would go around saying it was a horrible OS as well, even though most/all of its problems, like Vistas, were fixed with service packs.

SO. Now I'm going to get a bit less objective and say a few of my opinions.

Vista's Aero is gorgeous. It looks amazing compared to XP, and they completely screwed it up in 7. It's worth a few megs less free RAM in my opinion.

Also, lots of people and OEMs completely ruined Vista by looking at it as a "prettier XP" that would, since it had an option to upgrade straight from XP to Vista, run on any computer that could run XP, and thus ended up running Vista on their PIII/800 with 512mb of RAM and complaining it's the OSes fault it's so slow. Right.

How this relates to Windows 8

Let's look at how Win8 is similar to Vista...

1. New driver model

Like Vista, Windows 8 introduces a new driver model for graphics drivers. However, I feel this won't be as big of a problem because Win8 isn't RTM'd yet, and already NVidia and AMD have released drivers for many of their major graphics cards.

2. It's (drastically) different.

Microsoft has done something unusual (for them) and threw UIs at the wall to see what stuck. In this case, they borrowed the "Metro UI" from their brilliant Zune and Windows Phone devices and shoehorned it onto a desktop, with the intention of having one consistent look and feel throughout their entire product line, much like Apple has (sort of) done.

3. "Bloat"

ALL THOSE FANCY AN-EE-MAY-SHUNS ARE GONNA EAT MAH RAMS!

While it might look at a glance like all those swooshy animations and apps with no obvious close button should eat RAM like aunt agnes eats pie, Windows 8 is actually about as thin-n-light as XP was, and uses a lot of tricky techniques to keep size down.

However, most consumers don't realize the truth behind any of these points. It was why Vista failed, and it will probably cause Windows 8 to struggle in the market as well.

Opinions?

I have lots of opinions, but most of them aren't fit for this board.


No it doesn't. It's killed off XPDM support; WDDM is still very much there.

No it doesn't. It's killed off XPDM support; WDDM is still very much there.[/quote]
I've tried using Vista/7 graphics drivers in 8... crap didn't work, yo.

Here's a Vista/7 WDDM driver inf in notepad:



If I could be bothered to modify the highlighted lines, the driver would work.

My opinions then

My main problems with Vista, having now reflected on it were probably quite general. Certainly before service packs, it was a slower and much more unstable OS than XP, and while this got better with SP1 and 2, the user experience didn't. It was a step in the right direction, but had a great number of problems with it, which are too numerous to list here, but in any case, that was pretty much fixed with Windows 7, of which I am now a regular user (I've got it dualbooted with OS X). Just the little things, like the Explorer sidebar, which was a pet hate of mine in Vista, a few speed improvements, bigger title buttons, no more black borders when maximised, less annoying UAC and everything... I'd probably choose Win7 over OS X, although admittedly there are some things in OS X I'd like to keep

Windows 8. I'm not a fan of the Metro implementation in Windows Phone, having used it several times, it feels a bit TOO simplistic, but to be honest no mobile OS is perfect, and it can be a challenge to get a perfect balance between usability and user interface to be honest... But, Windows 8, having now seen the consumer preview, I think ultimately it's a step in the right direction, and it looks very promising. Again, just the little things, and admittedly I've not used it due to mainly a lack of time.

Anyway, so yeah, just my 2p.

Vista on the whole has been buggy as hell.
I cannot install or update Internet Explorer 9 prerelease
Everest/AIDA64 has a tendency to make it blue screen
I have to resort to Chrome or Firefox in order to have it working
Internet stopped working three times when the drivers were clearly installed and the adapter clearly worked on another PC.
It stopped letting me use both my mouse and keyboard and said that the drivers were for Windows 95 even though it used generic drivers supplied by MS, not proprietary drivers.


I've tried using Vista/7 graphics drivers in 8... crap didn't work, yo.[/quote]
If it's a OEM-built PC, look on the OEM's website, I did and I got Intel GMA 4500/Series 4 chipset graphics working.

I agree with the unstable part, It did get better and better as each service pack went by. You see, microsoft was living off XP for a long time, they wanted to make a "sharper" more "futuristic" OS, thus Vista was created. it was Microsoft's first run at aero, there will be slip ups, and Vista can be debated whether it was a failure, (Need I mention it was a heavier OS) or a accomplishment.

IMO it was a failed accomplishment. It was a step in the right direction, but not the whole thing

No more black borders when maximized? Whats a advantages of that? Didint MS say on a PDC (some longhorn one), that the point of maximizing window is that you concentrate on that and you dont need to see whats going on background.

Now with Windows 7 even when you do see back there the blur still remains which means theres no use of it.

I loved the fact that vista was opaque when maximized.

People are lemmings. They hate Vista because they hear other people hate Vista, so they feel as though that's the "cool" thing to do in order to fit in.

True, also vista was too way ahead of its own time. Install it on any modern PC and it'll feel just as good as Windows 7 ( they're basically the same)
I also think why I dont hate Vista and love it because I got my first OWN PC with Vista which already had plenty of power to run it (C2D machine). I never blamed it, never had any driver issues or something like that, I really like it.

You couldn't have put it into better words.

I used Vista as my primary OS for over a year, here was my experience.

There is a bit of a learning curve switching to the Vista style explorer. From 98 to XP, explorer really hadn't changed much. But once you get used to it there are some nice new features of Explorer. For me the upgrade to 7 felt like a smoother Vista. System tasks like search indexing and system restore backups seemed to be less resource intensive and overall Windows felt more responsive. I had some hardware driver issues on Vista but never had them once I upgraded to Windows 7. Issues such as HDMI output not working correctly, laptop refusing to sleep. This could have been merely because I don't regularly update my drivers, maybe if I upgraded them under Vista the issues would have went away like they did when I installed 7.

I had 4GB of RAM so memory really never was an issue on either OS, although once on Vista I had a memory leak where svchost was using 1GB of RAM, but that was only once.

I myself never minded it. As long as you have a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with 2 gigs of ram minumum it'll run great. I ran it on that configuration for a while and had no problems at all.

One of the worst problems was people trying to upgrade their systems that were bad for XP even. XP runs terrible on 512 MB ram and yet OEMs still felt it necessary to sell their computers with 128, 256 or 512 MB ram, which makes XP feel slow to me.

Another problem was the OEMs themselves. Many of the low-end laptops (Toshiba for example) shipped systems with Vista on something like a Core Solo and 512 MB ram STOCK configuration. This led to one hell of a slow laptop as Vista+512 MB Ram=fail.

I myself loved the Vista UI. It looked a lot prettier than the 7 UI does to me, no annoying white, I dunno, "shine" lines on the task bar when you disable transparency, and it never crashed on me.

As for driver support, one of the biggest problems was the introduction of 64-bit to the masses. No one really ran XP x64 as so few systems came with it stock. XP x64 driver support was terrible as it was so rare to find, so throwing Vista x64 out there made for a lot of devices lacking drivers. Sure, many systems had 64-bit processors (late model Pentium 4s, Core 2 [Solo\Duo\Quad], AMD Athlon 64, etc), but many of them never did have a 64-bit OS before Vista.

I dislike Vista because I bought a computer brand new with it installed. Even with all service packs and updates installed and all factory-installed bloatware removed the OS was slow, buggy, crash-prone, and ate up RAM like nothing else. I reinstalled XP after three weeks.

i LOVE Windows Vista. I dont see the reason for the hate after Service Pack 2 fixed like 90% of the issues.

My experience with vista, and the PC that ran it:
PC SPECS THAT RAN IT:
1GB Ram
80GB Hard Drive
Pentium 4

I ran Vista Ultimate and had service pack 2. It ran fast and was very good looking too. All my programs and games ran and i never once had an issue, in fact, i like it better then XP. On XP I would get viruses alot, but on Vista i never once had a virus, and never had antivirus software either. I love vista, but right now, my PC home is Windows 7.

*Agrees with author* Vista was simply ahead of it's time yes, it was buggy microsoft spent (years) changing Vista they had to hurry on the OS market but the SP's fixed it

While the minimum requirements for Vista got screwed sideways, I've owned Vista about a day or two before it RTM'd (Preorders on Amazon, sent out slightly early ) and I thought it was great despite the slowness on said system. Said system at the time for running Vista on was a Northwood P4 @ 2.4GHz with about 2 or 3GB RAM at the time and a 7600GT. Obviously Microsoft screwed up the Vista Capable programme because they said Vista would run comfortably on that, which it did to some extent but it was not up to the stage of what they suggested. That said, I have to agree it was a good move to get everyone to the far superior and fairly cheap at the time Core2Duo which were powerhouses when it came to Vista. I have used my Grandad's machine which is a 2.66GHz Core2Duo, 2GB RAM and an 8800GS of all things and it runs without an issue at SP2. At first it was a drag because of it's obvious RTM bugs. Everyone knows things at their RTM stage never go quite as well as they should. Vista with SP2 was just godlike though. Aside from a few driver issues and incompatibilities (such as leaving my WD Caviar 500GB plugged in to an internal SATA port can cause a stuck thread), I'd say Vista was one of the best OSes I have seen. I have to agree it's Aero is 50 times greater than 7's imho. That said, Vista will be entering extended support in a few years to come, a sign of the times really. While it's nice to use, it's looking to be the end of the line sadly. Back on topic though, I think people jumped on the bandwagon that Vista is terrible because they want to look cool and fit in with the crowd who have no idea what Vista actually is.

tl;dr, Vista is an excellent OS so long as it is used correctly, just like every other OS.

Vista was good. I ran Vista for a year until Windows 7 RC 1 came out.

I remember that in 2001, there is same bad reputations about Windows XP.
Users blamed Microsoft for hardware drivers, their outdated games and even the Luna theme.
It always happened when the latest OS came out.

I still use it on my gaming desktop, and I used it on my old Compaq F700 as well until that failed. At first it was slower due to the tiny amount of RAM, an upgrade fixed that later on however.

The problem, simply put, is that there were some problems at the very beginning when Vista was released, and while they were ironed out with better drivers and Service Pack 1, it never got to recover from the bad reputation it got at the beginning. Vista SP1/2 is actually pretty decent, but few people are willing to realize it.

And yes, some OEMs didn't read the system requirements properly. I actually saw a laptop that tried to run Vista at 384 MB RAM (512 MB - 128 MB video RAM) plus Norton Antivirus. It was pretty much a slideshow. Of course if people see that, they're quick to blame it on the operating system, even though it isn't Vista's fault at all.

Exactly what I was thinking, a lot of people didn't try vista because other "techs" told 'em to stay with XP because it was better.
They don't know why or in what XP is better but truly believe that.

I accept that Vista introduced a lot of changes and at the beginning it was slow and buggy (I didn't notice either) but it wasn't that bad, even the RTM version.

A lot of people base their opinions because their PC's came with 512 (or 384) MB of RAM, a 1 GHZ processor. I had the opportunity to use one of this and it was slow. MS forced a lot things because 6 years passed from XP and they wanted to upgrade every single PC on the planet.

On relation with Windows 8 it's just a matter of change, there were people who preferred the Program Manager over the Taskbar and Start Menu, now those same type of users prefer Start Menu over the Start Screen. Is just a matter of change, things cannot stay the same forever, change is constant and thus the replacement of the Start Menu with something else was natural.

8 comes with way less changes under the hood than Vista did (One of the only drastic changes that come to my mind is the EOS of XDDM drivers) it's only matter of time that customers accept the new UI (as it happened with 95, remember?).

PS: I still use Vista on my netbook because of Aero, as said by other people on this thread I really love the look of Aero on Vista. 7's Aero is just plain and simple. Iugh.

I find that pretty insulting, actually. I don't hate Vista because it's "cool". I hate it because I had very real and severe issues that weren't fixed by any service pack or update, and that affected my ability to USE my computer so severely that I willingly downgraded when given the option. Don't make generalizations.

Yes, exactly.

I may dislike Windows 8's Metro (on my desktop), but at least the OS still works. And in fact works better than Windows 7 does. Vista was terrible and I still have to work on other people computers that are still running it. Makes you go insane and want to pull your hair out.

Honestly, I agree with evan. BUT Derf is also right, because there are SOME people who just hate it because other people do.