Windows Vista Has Just 30 Days to Live

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
Staff member
Joined
Aug 20, 2006
Messages
13,000
The market share of Windows Vista is currently at .78 percent (less than XP), which means this announcement probably affects little to no one, but the OS that introduced Aero, Flip 3D, Gadgets, and other goodies will no longer be supported by Microsoft after April 11, 2017. You may now tell me your fondest memories of Windows Vista, assuming you even have any.

In a month’s time, Microsoft will put Windows Vista to rest once and for all. If you’re one of the few people still using it, you have just a few weeks to find another option before time runs out. After April 11, 2017, Microsoft will no longer support Windows Vista: no new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates, Microsoft says. (Mainstream Vista support expired in 2012.) Like it did for Windows XP, Microsoft has moved on to better things after a decade of supporting Vista. As Microsoft notes, however, running an older operating system means taking risks—and those risks will become far worse after the deadline.
 
Vista 64 had a lot of growing pains but was a great OS. If it had newer features like trim support, I would probably still run it.
 
The biggest problem with Vista was that it was released on a bunch of OEM hardware that wasn't nearly powerful enough to run it acceptably. OEMs had tons of cheap, slow stuff built to run XP (mainly a lot of stuff with 1GB or even 512MB of ram) and instead of sticking to its guns and keeping the minimum requirements high they relented to the pressure and allowed them to ship stuff that sucked. Any computer you see from that time period that has one of those stickers that says "built for XP compatible with Vista" you're going to have a terrible time with Vista on it.
 
I've still got a Vista Ultimate license. I was pissed about the upgrading screw job for Ultimate, and then forgot all about upgrading.
 
Still running it on one older laptop. Just got the word Firefox is dumping it in September too. Still works great. Linux Mint time I guess.
 
The biggest problem with Vista was that it was released on a bunch of OEM hardware that wasn't nearly powerful enough to run it acceptably. OEMs had tons of cheap, slow stuff built to run XP (mainly a lot of stuff with 1GB or even 512MB of ram) and instead of sticking to its guns and keeping the minimum requirements high they relented to the pressure and allowed them to ship stuff that sucked. Any computer you see from that time period that has one of those stickers that says "built for XP compatible with Vista" you're going to have a terrible time with Vista on it.

I feel this way about Windows 10, the RAM devouring O/S. Wife just got a Lenovo 110 with Windows 10 on it. After I removed/tweaked as much crap as possible, it still runs 47% of 4 gig RAM used on a fresh reboot with one tab open in Firefox. Going to wipe it today and start completely fresh and see if I can get it down a bit more.
 
Loved Vista still have it on my 32 bit computer, did miss charms when i went to Windows 10.

Guess I finally need Windows 10 32 bit (wonder if there is a no hog ram edition out there)
 
I feel this way about Windows 10, the RAM devouring O/S. Wife just got a Lenovo 110 with Windows 10 on it. After I removed/tweaked as much crap as possible, it still runs 47% of 4 gig RAM used on a fresh reboot with one tab open in Firefox. Going to wipe it today and start completely fresh and see if I can get it down a bit more.

That's Windows 10 doing it's job, caching the most used apps for faster opening, etc. That is by design not wasting ram and it will release that ram as needed. or you could have that extra ram sitting there doing nothing but make you feel good about all the free ram in task manager.
 
If you had a heavy system it worked great, I loved Vista, I feel it was more vendors and review sites that caused the bulk of the issues with it's perception. Good to know it's EOL, but we're still trying to migrate customers off XP and there's like 3-4 win 2k machines still in our system we can't get people to upgrade lol.

Just checked, out of 3500 machines, we've still got over 100 XP machines we can't get people to let go of, but there is only 12 Vista units left between all our customers. I guess people really didnt want it lol
 
That's Windows 10 doing it's job, caching the most used apps for faster opening, etc. That is by design not wasting ram and it will release that ram as needed. or you could have that extra ram sitting there doing nothing but make you feel good about all the free ram in task manager.

Yea, I've got Windows 10 on a 1 GB stream 7 tablet, it actually runs pretty damn well, much better then Vista ever did on 1 GB. And it still only uses about 70% of the RAM during browsing and stuff, about 50% at idle
 
After SP2 it seemed to be much better for me, but at release it was buggy and crashy at all times with games.
 
Vista was my first x64 OS. Worked great as long as you had enough memory and a fast hard drive. I liked it.

My only major gripe was that the folder positions of Documents would randomly reset themself even with auto-arranged off.
 
That's Windows 10 doing it's job, caching the most used apps for faster opening, etc. That is by design not wasting ram and it will release that ram as needed. or you could have that extra ram sitting there doing nothing but make you feel good about all the free ram in task manager.

7, 8 and 10 do much better than Vista did with this. Vista had two actual performance issues built into it: One was Superfetch was too aggressive to eat up memory and too lax to free it up when you needed it, and since there were no SSDs and HDDs were much slower back then you got a ton of HDD thrashing while the system moved resources around where it needed them, bringing the computer to a standstill in the meantime. The second was that the indexing service was too aggressive and would eat up your CPU and HDD cycles while you were trying to get other stuff done. Both were fixed in Windows 7, and that combined with the hardware better meeting requirements of the OS is why people have such a better view of 7 than Vista. The reality is that MS could have fixed Vista, but the launch made the name so tainted they felt it would be better for sales to start from scratch with Windows 7 than to fix it... and they were right because that is exactly how public sentiment remembers it.
 
I liked Vista 64bit vs xp 64 which never ran right for me. It was also the first time I saw live backgrounda, thought those were awesome when I first saw them. Then found they made my desktop too busy.
 
ran it for 5 years or so on a C2D game system with striped hd's , it took almost 2 minutes to boot , but never gave a BSOD .
 
My fondest memory of Vista was removing it for Windows 7.

Yup. I suppose it set the table and helped to make 7 look amazing to me by comparison. I'm having a hard time understanding the Vista love here. Vista is second to ME as the worst OS I've ever dealt with. But then again I don't go as deep down the rabbit hole as some folks here so ymmv.
 
Vista worked great once you tweaked it up a bit, nothing wrong with ME either!
 
7, 8 and 10 do much better than Vista did with this. Vista had two actual performance issues built into it: One was Superfetch was too aggressive to eat up memory and too lax to free it up when you needed it, and since there were no SSDs and HDDs were much slower back then you got a ton of HDD thrashing while the system moved resources around where it needed them, bringing the computer to a standstill in the meantime. The second was that the indexing service was too aggressive and would eat up your CPU and HDD cycles while you were trying to get other stuff done. Both were fixed in Windows 7, and that combined with the hardware better meeting requirements of the OS is why people have such a better view of 7 than Vista. The reality is that MS could have fixed Vista, but the launch made the name so tainted they felt it would be better for sales to start from scratch with Windows 7 than to fix it... and they were right because that is exactly how public sentiment remembers it.
Both of those issues are resolved with a fast hard drive :) I had a WD Black 640 GB and it handled all of that without issues.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Cobra
like this
Vista was a transition OS. The hate for it was a bit OTT but Windows users weren't used to security.

Microsoft really never took security seriously with Windows until Windows XP SP2. Vista then picked up where XP XP2 left off and boy that was painful for a lot Windows that also never thought much about security.
 
Both of those issues are resolved with a fast hard drive :) I had a WD Black 640 GB and it handled all of that without issues.

Definitely. A fast HDD and 4GB+ RAM fixed most issues with Vista. Or alternatively, most of my "cheaper" customers with slow HDDs and 1-2GB of RAM were amazed how disabling superfetch and the indexing service completely transformed their user experience with it.
 
Vista worked great once you tweaked it up a bit, nothing wrong with ME either!

Yeah there was. They took out the ability to use DOS for all intents and purposes even though it still ran on top of DOS.

Sure there were hacky ways to be able to use DOS, but it was never really stable that way.

Vista was good after SP1, and even better after SP2.

The main problem was the initial release was super buggy and OEMs sold machines with Vista on it that were at best low end XP machines. Because of this they ran like crap.
 
The Vista experience wasn't much of an issue for me, since I basically skipped it.

The few times I worked with it were for other people. I remember doing a repair job for a friend of a friend... Thankfully, this individual was no friend of mine.

The ninny claimed that his system was horribly slow, and that it used to be decent.

The system itself wasn't too bad for the times, that it had an Athlon X2 CPU in it, 1.25 GB of memory, a 120 GB hard drive, and the graphics were good enough for simple gaming. I saw that it had a Windows XP license sticker on it, but as it turned out, his idiotic son had installed Vista 64 bit on it, and also ended up getting it horribly infected with quite a few trojans, spyware, etc. His son didn't even have the correct video drivers installed.

I ended up wiping the drive, putting a fresh installation of XP Pro 32 bit on it, and installed the correct drivers for all of the hardware. It was actually running quite smoothly again, and I showed him that it was working fine.

One week later, this fellow comes back to me, angry at the situation, as he screamed "I thought you fixed this? It's now sucks again!"

As it turned out, his son had done another Vista 64 installation on top of it, and once again, got it infected again. Once again, he was running in 640x480 (or maybe it was 800x600?) mode, with 16 or 256 colors, using a generic driver.

His son was especially angry that I had blocked off a lot of malware infested sites, including his unwholesome download sites...

I tried to explain that 1) His son is an idiot, and that he got the system infected again, and 2) Vista 64 needed a LOT more memory than 1.25 GB. Of course, he wouldn't listen, and threatened to take it to Best Buy's Geek Squad (nevermind the fact that I only charged him 50 bucks in the first place).
 
Definitely. A fast HDD and 4GB+ RAM fixed most issues with Vista. Or alternatively, most of my "cheaper" customers with slow HDDs and 1-2GB of RAM were amazed how disabling superfetch and the indexing service completely transformed their user experience with it.

I still disable indexing.. well file content indexing anyway.

And I also get rid of prefetch. 0 need for it to waste space on an SSD.

But yeah, indexing was slow and buggy.. and still is. If the indexing gets screwed up it can cause all sorts of weird issues.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Cobra
like this
A local Best Buy sold me a half dozen open box Acer desktops for $25 apiece about six months after systems started shipping with Vista; for some unfathomable reason, these units had shipped with decent AMD AM2 dual-core CPUs and 256MB of RAM! You can imagine why they were all returned, haha. I pulled the RAM from each system, dropped in 2GB, and sold them for $200 profit each. Paid my rent for two months in an afternoon - not bad for my grad school days.
 
I had Vista Ultimate x64 installed on a workstation that was my main computer - 146gb SAS boot drive, 4x1tb drives in RAID something-or-other 16GB of ram, and a consumer grade video card. I never really had a problem with Vista itself, more my long-standing love of XP that made it difficult to want to change.

As an OS, it did its job admirably, in my opinion. Needed to give it a smack to nail down the UAC stuff a bit, but otherwise it was just fine for me.
 
I feel this way about Windows 10, the RAM devouring O/S. Wife just got a Lenovo 110 with Windows 10 on it. After I removed/tweaked as much crap as possible, it still runs 47% of 4 gig RAM used on a fresh reboot with one tab open in Firefox. Going to wipe it today and start completely fresh and see if I can get it down a bit more.
Empty ram is wasted ram. Its not bad the OS is using it at idle or when you're not needing it for what you're doing. If the OS isn't relequishing the RAM when a program you're using needs it, that's a problem...but who cares if its using a ton of ram at idle or low loads. There are things the OS needs to do in the background that are perfectly acceptable (not phoning home to MS)...but maintenance tasks and what not.
 
I actually bought the Bill Gates Signature Edition of Vista back in the day... $399 (or $299 can't remember - way too much either way). :ROFLMAO: Sold it on eBay some years back for $125.
 
Yup. I suppose it set the table and helped to make 7 look amazing to me by comparison. I'm having a hard time understanding the Vista love here. Vista is second to ME as the worst OS I've ever dealt with. But then again I don't go as deep down the rabbit hole as some folks here so ymmv.

It's just hindsight. At the time it launched nobody in the tech community understood why Vista ran so much worse than XP on the same systems. Now we both know why it did and how to fix it, so it doesn't seem as bad as it did back then. The public at large still doesn't understand this... they only remember they had a cheap PC that ran it and sucked with it, and they still vilify it as a result.
 
Windows Vista is still the only NT-based OS I ever ran a single install of from the day 1 until it was replaced. I installed it on launch day and it ran just fine 'til the day Windows 7 launched and I updated to it. I had almost no issues with it, too. The only other time I did that was with Windows Me ironically.
 
Having 8gb(!!!) of RAM and knowing how to shut UAC up made Vista a downright pleasure to use.
 
Vista worked just fine for me too... as others noted, a few tweaks to reign it in and all was good.
 
Vista didn't work grat out of the box. it had multiple performance issues/bugs

one of thsose that i remember was that 1gbit network would be throttle to insane low speed if you play any music because it was trying to save you CPU from beeing overload by multiemdia + network load on the CPU. and the algoritm for it had a bug in it.
We say 6 people at a lan party and couldnt figure out why our lan was so bad to transfer files.
MS did patch it within the first couple of months i believe but at the time iwas back to XP64
 
I installed Vista 3 times, each time running into bugs and compatibility issues with it. One was a game related issue, one was a problem with The Windows media transfer protocol and the last one was some serious bug. Ended up sticking it out on Windows XP SP3 until Windows 7 SP1? Windows 7 had been pretty great. Had to upgrade to Windows 10 because they're holding Forza Horizon 3 hostage which is the shittiest way to sell an operating system, but I'm used to it. Can't play new games unless you buy the new console etc etc. I also started having issues with certain games that Default to Directx12 and wouldn't run well on windows 7.
 
Back
Top