What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider’s Retrospective

Vista was great if you had compatible hardware. You basically got Windows 7 two years early.

I remember it took Creative a good year to push X-Fi Vista drivers with all features enabled, and Nvidia drivers were terrible for a few months. ATI had rolled out Catalyst Control Center before the Vista launch and they were fine out the gate.
 
ManofGod said:
Strange, considering I had one and it ran Vista Ultimate really well, much better than Windows XP.
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I wouldn't say 'much better,' but those Atom netbooks do actually run Vista fine. My Mom still has a 10" MSI Wind with Vista.

I'm surprised Microsoft let Google take over that market.
 
I had a rig with Vista, https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883113058. It was an awesome rig that at the time I could only just barely beat price-wise by doing a self-build. Plus the local BB gave me a couple hundred off(ended up being ~$800-$900 for a floor model since the newest was coming out a few weeks later. Fun rig that I used and upgraded up until I did my z68/2600k build.

Mostly liked it. Once I adjusted the UAC and had a nice layer of A/V stuff running the system was pretty stable. I agree with others about the drivers though. Right out of the box there was a missing one for one of the MOBO chips. Took me a while to find it. I eventually upgraded to 7 when it came out. Same driver issues. I also immediately noticed how when you 'got under the hood' most things looked the same. I remember all the praise for 7 and used to tell people that it was basically just a version of Vista with certain things toned down.

I enjoyed this article it was neat to read the process and the challenges. Felt pretty truthful too.
 
I went from win2k to Vista, and at start it was a bloody mess, but after a couple patches and some better drivers it ran decently, after SP1 it even ran good.

Still dumped it asap for win7 when that came out, my dad however used vista until a couple years ago, he's now on 7 he tried 10 but hated it :p

but yeah, I read a similar article like this a couple years ago and mismanagement, overambitiousness and maybe even murphy's law all had a hand in vista failing.
 
Budzman said:
Slow garbage computers and laptops killed Vista. Never ever had enough ram on any of those OEM systems. Coupled with slow ass 5400 rpm HDD's.
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I had a gig of RAM with a single core CPU (I really don't recall, I think it was a single core AMD) and Win 7 in a VM was faster and more responsive than Vista was on the metal.
 
I had no issues with Vista running on mid to high performance hardware of the time. I ran Vista from when it first came out till 7 was released. As long as you weren't running shit old hardware and fed it 2-4 GB of RAM it ran just fine and no issues with drivers.
 
when computers get powerful enough they most likely can just virtual machine all the old programs while new programs runs on a clean version of windows.
 
it was interesting reading how, like right now, MS has issues with AV vendors
 
katanaD said:
it was interesting reading how, like right now, MS has issues with AV vendors
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One problem Microsoft has always had is software developers not following it's guidelines when building software for Windows. Frequently, this creates permissions issues, performance problems and leads to unexpected results which Microsoft gets blamed for. Microsoft fucks shit up, but the fiasco that was Vista wasn't entirely on them. As others have said, OEMs were largely to blame. Not only did they not equip machines with sufficient memory but their pre-installed factory bloatware was often built for Windows XP and patched only enough to make it physically run on Vista. There are a myriad of reasons why Vista sucked, but fewer reasons for it can be laid at Microsoft's feet than is generally believed.
 
Vista was fine, the problem was RAM prices at release. It simple could not run on 512MB or even 1GB and that's what 90% of the machines with Vista got...
 
I ordered many high spec PC's for clients with Vista and they all ran fine, but any system with 1GB or less ran like a dog. Why couldn't they just have warned makers not to low spec Vista machines?
 
Vista should have been aborted or at least delayed for more baking time. They could have run Win 2000 up to SP10 for all I cared, right up to Win 7. I remember Win 2k and 2k3 being so stable (compared to ME and early XP). But the OEM's were screaming for something "new and shiny", and boy howdy they got it.

Most of us tech savvy people already had 2GB + of ram by that point, so not a huge deal. But Vista running on 512mb or even 1gb (and 1gb was plenty for XP, unless you were playing Battlefield 2 LOL) was agonizing.

However I would like to raise a giant middle finger in the sky to the hardware OEMs who decided to turn Vista into a money making opportunity to gouge us. I'm looking at you, Creative Labs, HP, Epson, etc. Creative basically decided... so what if your $200 sound card works fine.... Vista is here and if you want drivers you have to buy new hardware. HP and Epson did the same shit with printers and drivers, but I think they saw the light a bit quicker. Were it not for the infamous Daniel K soundblaster drivers (which I still use today, HAHA) I would never have owned another Creative product.

Maybe Windows in it's current iteration is too bloated and fat from 20 years of feature creep. Maybe it's time to start over from scratch. But I can only imagine what kind of driver hell that would be.
 
MS windows is bound by legacy ... wasn't Vista kind of an attempt to push people with aging hardware into upgrading?
I loved 7 skipped vista.. for the most part.. had to use it on some machines.. but windows 7 ultimate was the ultimate!
Win10 seems to be pretty solid... gone are the days of dual booting for me.. between win7 or winX... just run 10 now and i am happy with it...for the most part.
 
rudy said:
Now days steam is the most popular platform, no one worries about not having the right version of a game to play with their friend or going to search for a patch. Its all automatic. Slowly and steadily steam constantly updates and improves.
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Hahaha. Yeah, sure, you betcha. Change that to "most don't worry". There are plenty of games still where version incompatibility matters. Some where you have to roll back or go to the "experimental" beta patch to fix problems. Losing connection to steam servers (but not your internet) can boot people out of games (see Space Engineers for some fun on that). Steam can bork your game install and thus you spend 10+ minutes (however fast your system is and how big the game is) verifying the install.
 
I remember the first time I was gaming and the sound driver on Vista crashed. With XP that meant rebooting your system but with Vista it was ctrl-alt-del, end the game and restart the game without re-booting. Incredible!! As others have noted Vista ran "well" with adequate ram and if your peripherals manufacturers didn't flake out with support.
 
I tried Vista on various occasions during its lifetime. The main problem I had with it was not drivers or stability, but performance and usability.
The computers I used to try Vista were high end at the time, and had at least 4GB RAM, but still felt like crappy Atom mini-laptops. And the endless nagging by UAC and unfriendly changes to the network control panel were the cherry on the cake.
Windows 7 ran much better on those computers than Vista ever did, even with less RAM. Even Win 10 feels faster that 7 (and way better than Vista) on some of those older computers.
 
Skylinestar said:
Windows Millennium Edition isn't getting much love too.
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ME's biggest problem was shovelware.

I was in the ME beta, so I got, as everyone did, a clean copy of the OS. At about that time I had bought a new HP desktop with ME preinstalled, and it ran like crap. Slow, hung, crashes all the time, HTTPS wouldn't work in any web browser, etc. One day I got sick of it and wiped the drive and reinstalled fresh from my clean copy instead of the HP reinstall discs, and every single issue went away.

The other big problem--this affected Vista too, and a lot worse in Vista--was using older hardware that didn't have updated drivers. People with new machines shipped with Vista (or those who upgraded but had no hardware that didn't have Vista drivers) had far fewer problems.
 
Vista was the last Windows I actually liked. Windows 7 started hiding too many things. Win 8/8.1 well I use it but don't like it (though one gets used to it and I've used some stuff to improve it). Win 10. not really compatible with the way I do things and my limited internet, I'll VM it if I have to otherwise I'm looking into Linux. I really liked Win 3.1 and Win 98 was mostly good, 2K I liked, XP wasn't much over 2k I thought (though 64bit intro was good).
I never had Vista problems but I built my own machines and only bought components that had drivers for Vista (I built a new machine for Vista it was time anyway).
 
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mynamehere said:
I've still got Ultimate 32/64 disks that I paid a small fortune for. Ultimate users got screwed when it came to a W7 upgrade.
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Yea they did, I contemplated buying some when I found them for $10 a key but they would of mostly sat unused.
 
gunbust3r said:
Vista was fine, the problem was RAM prices at release. It simple could not run on 512MB or even 1GB and that's what 90% of the machines with Vista got...
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Read my post:
GDI Lord said:
I had a gig of RAM with a single core CPU (I really don't recall, I think it was a single core AMD) and Win 7 in a VM was faster and more responsive than Vista was on the metal.
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in addition to what everyone said OEM's used to shove huge amount of poorly coded bloatware all over their laptops. I think I learned all the msconfig and similar tricks and tried all the "speed you pc" tools in that era.
 
Azphira said:
What happened to vista is what's happening to the president and windows 10, hatewagoneering.

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There is nothing new about this if you tell people to find differences in something and hand them the same exact thing they will still find 'differences' . I assume you mean president Obama, ' cause otherwise you're not making any sense.
 
Were PreFetch and SuperFetch also introduced in Vista? (I'm assuming that indexing was.)
 
The questions/statements about the indexing and fetching reminded me about a feature that actually did help a bit on my gateway. . .readyboost. These days it's pretty much useless with fast ram and ssd's but back then plugging in a 4-8GB flash and leaving it there could give substantial performance gains. Not everybody spoke favorably about it but I definitely noticed improvements with that cheap add-on.
 
Interesting. I saw zero improvement on Windows 7 with ReadyBoost. When I tried ReadyBoost I was running 2GB of RAM and a 5400RPM HDD. Maybe it made a bigger difference in Vista?
 
I remember Vista being a bit doggy when it first came out. But the service pack fixed it tremendously and I actually recall liking Vista. It wasn't long after that I switched to 7 and moved on.

I do remember everyone hating on Vista originally and it kept that reputation all the way until Windows 7. At the end, I think it was better than most gave it credit for.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
I remember it took Creative a good year to push X-Fi Vista drivers with all features enabled, and Nvidia drivers were terrible for a few months. ATI had rolled out Catalyst Control Center before the Vista launch and they were fine out the gate.
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Well, Creative got royally screwed by the Vista launch, as it Vista ended the directsound hardware abstraction layer, and essentially undercut Creatives entire business model. Whats worse, they notified Creative of this very very late in the development cycle giving them next to no time to respond to it.

Creative was able to patch some of it back in using OpenAL and Alchemy, but a lot of the positional audio features were permanently lost.

The sad thing is that Creative mostly took the flak for this, not Microsoft.
 
More interested in a "What the F happened with Windows 8 & 10" breakdown from an MS employee or insider. The entire metro tiled era of suck basically.

Will probably take a few more years before anyone's willing to go on record and admit the colossal blunders in retrospect (GWX, upgradegate, forced telemetry and updates with no opt out), but by now it's pretty clear to management that 10 is turning people off at worst, and at best most users are just tolerating it for it's basic functions and to launch their Steam games while ignoring all the store/edge/cortana bloat.

We'll see if Windows 11 returns the platform to sanity as a proper successor to 7, the way 7 righted the wrongs of Vista.
 
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DPI said:
More interested in a "What the F happened with Windows 8 & 10" breakdown from an MS employee or insider. The entire metro tiled era of suck basically.

Will probably take a few more years before anyone's willing to go on record and admit the colossal blunders in retrospect (GWX, upgradegate, forced telemetry and updates with no opt out), but by now it's pretty clear to management that 10 is turning people off at worst, and at best most users are just tolerating it for it's basic functions and to launch their Steam games while ignoring all the store/edge/cortana bloat.

We'll see if Windows 11 returns the platform to sanity as a proper successor to 7, the way 7 righted the wrongs of Vista.
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I think it is pretty clear what happened here.

Microsoft predicted dwindling computer (desktop and laptop) sales, and their revenues depended on OS license fees for these systems.

At the same time they saw Google (in Android) and Apple (in both iOS and OS X) sell entire ecosystems with revenue streams attached to them (in search, app stores, music stores, etc.)

Microsoft figured, if they can do it, why can't we?

So, Windows 10 became the strategy to move Microsoft into a long term revenue stream market so they could depend less on the initial OS license for revenue. Windows 10 became their first real foray into providing an entire revenue generating ecosystem. Because of this, it became VERY important that people upgraded to Windows 10, as if they didn't they couldn't use all the features Microsoft wanted to generate revenues., and thus the heavy handed upgrade tactics, and ecosystem apps that cannot be uninstalled.

As much as I hate what Windows has become, and am disgusted by their heavy handed upgrade tactics, I also understand where they are coming from. Google and Apple are both selling these ecosystems. Why should Microsoft be any different?

Personally I would prefer if all these things were separate on ALL platforms, including Windows, Android, iOS and OSX, where an operating system is just an operating system, and the user decides freely from a vast number of third party alternatives which applications to install, and is not forced to have the base ecosystem applications installed.

I hope we get there some day, though it seems unlikely.
 
lostin3d said:
The questions/statements about the indexing and fetching reminded me about a feature that actually did help a bit on my gateway. . .readyboost. These days it's pretty much useless with fast ram and ssd's but back then plugging in a 4-8GB flash and leaving it there could give substantial performance gains. Not everybody spoke favorably about it but I definitely noticed improvements with that cheap add-on.
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For me I never saw any performance impact, but that's probably for the following reasons:

Readyboost was a Vista feature, and I didn't run Vista until just before the Windows 7 release. I stuck with Linux as my primary and XP as my dual boot gaming OS for a long time. By the time I did install Vista (I'd had an XP crash, and didn't want to install clean XP again) Windows 7 was right around the corner and all Vista sales came with "free upgrade to Windows 7 uon release) offers. At that time I had an i7-920 with a 120GB OCZ Agility SSD and 6GB of RAM. With that hardware readyboost did jack shit.
 
If I recall correctly, one of Vista's biggest changes was the implementation of UAC and NOT granting administrative access by default on all user accounts (which is what XP did, to the rage of sysadmins everywhere). This both screwed up alot of software that all assumed administrative access and irritated users who weren't used to having to explicitly grant escalated privileges to software (which meant a lot forum + blog posts about how to bypass/disable UAC).
 
DPI said:
More interested in a "What the F happened with Windows 8 & 10" breakdown from an MS employee or insider. The entire metro tiled era of suck basically.

Will probably take a few more years before anyone's willing to go on record and admit the colossal blunders in retrospect (GWX, upgradegate, forced telemetry and updates with no opt out), but by now it's pretty clear to management that 10 is turning people off at worst, and at best most users are just tolerating it for it's basic functions and to launch their Steam games while ignoring all the store/edge/cortana bloat.

We'll see if Windows 11 returns the platform to sanity as a proper successor to 7, the way 7 righted the wrongs of Vista.
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From what I understand, there will be no Windows 11. All will be called Windows 10. In fact, there are various different Windows with different features, all of them are called Windows 10. It's a nightmare.

I'm used to Arch Linux's and Manjaro's rolling release, and our works beautifully (most of the time). But Microsoft's version of a rolling release OS has a lot to be desired.

It's not that I think Win 10 is garbage, but they screw up something all the time with those forced updates and point releases.
 
Glock24 said:
I'm used to Arch Linux's and Manjaro's rolling release, and our works beautifully (most of the time). But Microsoft's version of a rolling release OS has a lot to be desired.

It's not that I think Win 10 is garbage, but they screw up something all the time with those forced updates and point releases.
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I honestly wonder just how well any update process works across hundreds of millions of devices with countless hardware and software configurations. Linux folks frequently point out how well updating under Linux work. But with hundreds of millions of machines and non-expert users I doubt Linux would fare any or much better than Windows. In any case, without a shit ton of hard data one is guessing.
 
Master_shake_ said:
Shitty OEM's happened.

selling basic shit Xp computers with vista on it happened.

shitty peripheral manufacturers happened.

but people being people when a vista SP came out called windows 7 everything was suddenly better.
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