Ask some people why Windows Vista failed and they will tell you that most of the problem came from hardware compatibility. I don’t remember ever having problems with Vista back when I used it. Then again I was running it on a brand new computer with the OS in question preinstalled.
And that’s another thing, I think you’re pretty much expected to upgrade your hardware at least every few years. I’d like to think that the people who had problems with Vista kept the same white-box PC they’ve had since 98SE, or even 95. Vista ran great if you had the right hardware. Maybe if Microsoft had optimized their OS even for XP-era machines it would have seen greater adoption.
I also really liked the Aero glass theme, it made younger me feel like I was in the future. Those gadgets at the side of the desktop were pretty cool too. Overall I think it was definitely ahead of its time, and with support for current software and hardware, would have been a solid choice for average computer users today.
A number of the systems that shipped with Vista preinstalled actually didn’t even come close to being suitable specs to run Vista smoothly. Maybe you got lucky and actually got a good high end system, but they seriously underestimated the memory and processing requirements for Vista when it came out.
Yeah, I’m no MS fanboy at all, but Vista really wasn’t that bad.
Most of the complaints were because of crappy hardware manufacturers putting out systems that were only meeting the minimum specs to run Vista. Those “Walmart special” PCs usually had 512 MB RAM and a low-quality Seagate drive. That, and hardware vendors with crappy driver support.
Once it booted to the desktop, your 512 MB was gone. As soon as you try to launch an application, it would start swapping nonstop to disk and everything just crawled. That put a lot of wear and tear on the disk which eventually failed because it was low quality to start with.
I worked in a repair shop back in Vista’s heyday, and the fix was always the same: Give it at least a GB of memory, replace the failing Seagate drive, reinstall, and it ran like it should have when it was new.
This one. Most systems in the spec didn’t have the RAM to run aero effectively, and ran like shit. If you had 1-2GB of RAM, it worked fine; just you had less of that RAM available to allocate to the same apps that worked great under XP. If you were lucky enough to have a 64-bit processor, Vista was actually pretty nice, compared to the XP 64-bit edition and the driver nightmare that entailed.
The UAC prompts were over the top. To me that was the worst part. They were toned down to a more reasonable level in every version after. But I agree otherwise.
Seems like vista would always ask you 2 or 3 times if you were sure you wanted to open that text file you just created. Vista was ugly too. It was insulting the amount of system resources it used to look that bad. I feel like Vista was also the beginning of Windows trying to integrate into everything you did, rather than just provide a smooth reliable and concise way for you to use your software.
All that being said, Vista looks pretty good compared to 11. At least Vista has a consistent feel to the settings, and the fucking control panel works.
If you had modern hardware and installed the x64 version it was very good.
They tried to change too much at once. The change between 98,ME,98SE, and XP UI were gradual improvements. Then Vista came along and did almost an overhaul of the UI. They refined the UI for 7 which people liked.
