Windows Vista Has Just 30 Days to Live

I have nvidia driver issues running SLI on vista for about a year. Some print driver issues etc as it was a new platform. About a year in I had it tweaked and not frontloading tons of crap anymore. When I installed Windows 7 it actually went slower as I had my Vista tweaked so much. So it started off rocky but ended on a high note. Most of my issues with it were Nvidia's fault.
 
gtrguy said:
Vista worked just fine for me too... as others noted, a few tweaks to reign it in and all was good.
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I wish I could say the same with Win 10 "to reign it in" more horse power than needed, whats not to like. The only thing that needs to be reighed in Win 10 is MS "ET trying to phone home" all the time. From being a keylogger to being a cable network full of ADS to baby sitting you on the net by logging and keeping you safe from yourself, etc, etc. 15 to 20 different ways for MS to have reasons to phone home, last I checked on consumer versions Win10's.
 
Dusty_M said:
After SP2 it seemed to be much better for me, but at release it was buggy and crashy at all times with games.
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Probably due to video drivers. I saw a chart outlining causes for Vista bsod episodes, and it was like 66% nvidia drivers, 25% ati drivers, and the rest printer drivers. Hardware manufacturers totally didn't get their shit together at all before release and people's perception of Vista was really damaged because of it.

Of course in time they fixed their shit, and magically Vista got better.
 
Pre-SP1 Vista sucked...performance seemed terrible, it was buggy, etc. After SP1 it felt fine.
 
Poor driver kick-off and belligerently introduced file system locking down of individual user's data and configuration files. Both things could have been rolled out better.
 
My fondest memory of ... Vista? Only giving the finger to that cluster**** of an OS as I formatted the drives of two new laptops and dropped Ubuntu and freshly released Windows 7 on them =)
 
I had beta tested Vista for ms before its release in return for a free copy of Vista Ultimate 64 bit. When i got got my full legit copy it took over 4 hrs just to install the OS not including anything else. At the time i had a high end amd cpu\gpu forgot the specs but my rigs are always med-high end regardless.....Then im not sure why LULZ MS kept sending me hate dvd's of vista for months after that im not sure but the OS was always slow and the uac once turned off didnt seem to help much just a bad OS with drivers and motherboard issues and stuff just never really worked well with it glad to see it gone :D
 
Vista was the only OS where I had to restore from the factory reset partition multiple times due to choking on Windows Updates.

I have an old Vista laptop that had to be pressed back into service. Just last week I updated it to Windows 8.1. Not that I'm a fan of 8.1, but I had a spare license sitting around so it didn't cost anything. Classic Shell makes it usable.
 
I loved Vista. It was my favorite OS (Windows 7 was more of a Vista SP that fixed a lot of things). It looked great, it worked great for me. Like others mentioned, it was a combination of security and underpowered hardware that caused the majority of hate. A few other things, but they weren't the main ones.

What's cool is that Windows 10 can run on lower end hardware and be faster than Vista. :)

RIP Vista.
 
Cobra said:
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.
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+1

Had too many Vista Laptops (even with 2GB ram) that would become unusable for several minutes at a time used due to heavy disk access.
We ended up reverting to XP (no more problems) and staying there until Windows 7 came out.
 
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Ur_Mom said:
What's cool is that Windows 10 can run on lower end hardware and be faster than Vista. :)

RIP Vista.
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FWIW, so can 8.1, if not more so, since it's basically 10 minus the extra bloat.

Anyhoo, If SSD's had come along a few years sooner then Vista might have unfolded differently.
 
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Vista was a good OS. People were just butthurt because their crappy PCs couldn't take advantage of it capabilities.
 
I used Vista for quite a while and never had an issue with it, then again I started on SP1 which fixed alot of the bugs of the initial release.
 
Tried Vista for a few weeks when it came out. Got fed up with its poor performance and other sillyness. This was after using XP for a long time.

After deciding I was fed up I concluded I should start seriously learning how to use Linux.
 
Vista was the best OS Microsoft ever produced. If you had supported hardware you basically got Windows 7 two years early. I do understand the hate from people with poorly supported older hardware. People whining about UAC are just dumb, the first thing I do on any Windows box is go into the registry editor and force UAC to not only always prompt but also require a password from admin users for all administrative actions. Install games to a C:/Games directory or another partition to avoid UAC sandboxing issues.

There were minor improvements in 7, but most of the love for 7 was just marketing hype. By the time 7 came out driver support for the Vista NT6 Kernel was mature and integrated GPU's were powerful enough to handle the Aero Glass GUI without shitting the bed. 7 and every version since have actually been feature regressions from Vista.
 
Cobra said:
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.
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Exact;y... Also poor driver support by manufacturers killed Vista's reputation. Every system I built ran flawlessly.

I was blown away the first time a sound driver crash locked up my game and I was able to ctrl-alt-del to task manager, end task, and restart the game without rebooting Vista. Windows 7 = Vista Second Edition.
 
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I think some here are viewing Vista with rose colored glasses. It wasn't just a memory hog, there were many, many issues. Printing was nightmare for one thing. Drivers another, especially graphics drivers and games. It got much, much better after the first SP and even better after the second but it was garbage out of the gate for a lot of people who couldn't wait for Win 7 to get here.
 
DPI said:
FWIW, so can 8.1, if not more so, since it's basically 10 minus the extra bloat.

Anyhoo, If SSD's had come along a few years sooner then Vista might have unfolded differently.
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I'm glad I'm not the only person running 8.1 on purpose.

Vista 64-bit was fine from the beginning for me. 32-bit was flaky, but smoothed out after the service packs were released. I did have decent hardware at the time, which made a big difference with Vista.
 
Etherton said:
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.
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Bill donated the difference to charity for you.
 
Bowman15 said:
I think some here are viewing Vista with rose colored glasses. It wasn't just a memory hog, there were many, many issues. Printing was nightmare for one thing. Drivers another, especially graphics drivers and games. It got much, much better after the first SP and even better after the second but it was garbage out of the gate for a lot of people who couldn't wait for Win 7 to get here.
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+1. I also seem to remember an SP1 disaster where if an update wasn't applied then SP1 either failed or hung. I remember a lot of folks waiting hours to get updates installed (or sometimes even Vista itself.) And I remember there was some kind of MS activation issue causing several thousand installs to become flagged as non-legit copies. Pile that on with slow hardware, and incompatible buggy drivers at launch, and you could see why MS went directly to Windows Mojave. ;)
 
Betaboy1983 said:
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.
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I have a number of 2GB machines running 32 or 64 bit windows 10 just fine.
 
When the 780g chipset came out I had to have a motherboard with one. I took a Friday off from work to put it together and installed XP. I found out every time I tried to play a DVD it crashed the system. I would've never played a DVD on that computer any way since it was my gaming computer but I was bothered that it didn't work corectly. After installing XP several times and troubleshooting to no avail I just decided to install Vista. It actually solved all my problems; imagine that.
 
I'm shocked at the amount of love. I thought Vista was terrible. Constant hard disk thrashing and easily broken. I remember my in-laws getting a quad core machine w/ 8GB and Vista 64, it ran OK but even with all that horsepower it was never great. Migrating to a SSD landed an improvement, but still not enough. Everyone that I have ever upgraded to 7 from Vista loved the improvements.
 
I'm going to run it in a VM for a little giggle. Fun times vista. I actually liked it's new visuals. Didn't greatly have any issues with it.
 
Vista SP2 32bit was the only OS that could show full 4gb ram in Windows Properties, not like 3.75gb or 3.5gb as shown on XP 32bit and Win 7 32bit with 4gb ram.

I really liked the name and its logo: Longhorn. But I don't understand why they changed it to Vista.
 
I have a client with a laptop on Vista. What is the best upgrade assuming we stay with Microsoft Windows? I do not think Windows 10 is available for free when upgrading from Vista.
 
Other than it's constant hard drive thrashing it's been working just fine since 2005 on my old socket 775 system. And it's used daily.
 
bobrossvista.jpg
 
biggles said:
I have a client with a laptop on Vista. What is the best upgrade assuming we stay with Microsoft Windows? I do not think Windows 10 is available for free when upgrading from Vista.
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Get an SSD + Find a cheap Windows 7 key.

Then just wait it out until Microsoft returns to sanity and ships a proper successor to 7 (they'll have to eventually at the rate Windows 10 is being abandoned for 7).
 
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I had Vista installed on my PC for at least a week and the experience was just awful. It took longer to load, and I remember watching a video on my hard drive and it had to "buffer" which I thought was strange and really annoyed me because it was on a local drive, not a network one. I just got fed up with the poor performance issues and went back to XP 64. Once Windows 7 came out, Vista just didn't exist to me anymore. Never used Vista ever since, good riddance anyway because Vista was never a popular OS and nobody I knew used it anyway.
 
Bowman15 said:
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.
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Makes me feel great actually. Sorry, I must use my computer differently than most people, but I do not need 3D builder, Alarm clock, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Candy Crush, Connect, Get Office and so on all running in the backround JUST IN CASE I decided to 'Get Office' and save myself 7miliseconds of time.

I find it's a waste to have so much pure shit running constantly. You wouldn't uninstall Cortana if you could?
 
cyclone3d said:
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.
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this.

machines sold could barely run xp let alone vista.

my favourite part was when MS re-skinned windows vista and called it windows 7.
 
Betaboy1983 said:
Makes me feel great actually. Sorry, I must use my computer differently than most people, but I do not need 3D builder, Alarm clock, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Candy Crush, Connect, Get Office and so on all running in the backround JUST IN CASE I decided to 'Get Office' and save myself 7miliseconds of time.

I find it's a waste to have so much pure shit running constantly. You wouldn't uninstall Cortana if you could?
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It's not just worthless apps it's caching, it's also the most frequently used ones among other operating system files, etc. Like I stated before that ram is immediately freed up if you need it. Seems like your the one worry about those 7 milliseconds more than anyone. You're just arguing about an issue in Windows 10 that isn't there. If you check task manager those "needless" apps sitting in the background take up hardly any ram at all.

I also turn off all those apps, turn off all sharing and cortona. That is a different subject though (sharing and telemetry) and not really related to this "placebo issue" you have with Windows 10. Every newer OS gets better with how it handles ram. There are some reasons to not like how Win 10 handles things but memory control isn't one of them.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Vista was the best OS Microsoft ever produced. If you had supported hardware you basically got Windows 7 two years early. I do understand the hate from people with poorly supported older hardware. People whining about UAC are just dumb, the first thing I do on any Windows box is go into the registry editor and force UAC to not only always prompt but also require a password from admin users for all administrative actions. Install games to a C:/Games directory or another partition to avoid UAC sandboxing issues.

There were minor improvements in 7, but most of the love for 7 was just marketing hype. By the time 7 came out driver support for the Vista NT6 Kernel was mature and integrated GPU's were powerful enough to handle the Aero Glass GUI without shitting the bed. 7 and every version since have actually been feature regressions from Vista.
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I kind of agree with this sentiment. Yes out of the box there were a pair of services that needed to be turned off, and you might run into some compatibility issues with older hardware. But other than that Vista set the stage for the modern OS. Everything since it has been based upon it's kernel, and just tweaked here and there. I'd personally say Windows 7 and even 8.1 are better than Vista, but the reason they are better is because they had a solid foundation to start from. Vista will always be the fall boy for Windows, but unlike ME which was just a revision of a previous OS, it was the start of a new generation. I couldn't even imagine where we'd be at today if Vista didn't happen, would we still be using XP on the desktops? Would Microsoft have exited the server market because their OS couldn't keep up in the modern world?
 
DPI said:
Get an SSD + Find a cheap Windows 7 key.

Then just wait it out until Microsoft returns to sanity and ships a proper successor to 7 (they'll have to eventually at the rate Windows 10 is being abandoned for 7).
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Where do you suggest to buy a cheap Windows 7 key?
 
Vista worked well on modern systems (at the time). Its biggest issue was 3rd party hardware developers dragging their feet on writing drivers that worked well. Nvidia took a few months after Vista's release but they eventually got it right. Creative took years and (based on what I've seen) had lost a lot of their customer base due to this. Another problem was that Intel had a lot of old 9XX chipsets it needed to dump, so Intel and Microsoft came up with that confusing "Vista Capable/Ready" bullshit that fouled the marketplace with computers that were stated to support the OS but couldn't actually support the parts people wanted.

Another "problem" Vista had was the fact that it appeared to use a lot of system RAM. In fact, the OS placing as much data into RAM as it could was a good thing overall, but the common IT guy at the time didn't understand this and therefore labeled the OS a "resource hog". By the time people started to understand this, Vista's reputation was already all but ruined and Windows 7 was already in beta.
 
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