3 ms·

If my memory serves me correctly, a lot of the public outrage at the time was about poor drivers for some time after release?

ams6110 10y ago
Also wasn't that the release that had endless popup warnings asking permission for arcane things. Anyone who used it became trained to just click "Allow" a dozen times just to get on with what they wanted to do.
- yuhong 10y ago
  OP already mentioned UAC.
- NamTaf 10y ago
  The issue was chiefly that XP didn't enforce good programming practices (storing user info in /Program Files/ was rife and one of many issues). Introducing the UAC security structure meant that suddenly all of these applications tried to do things that triggered UAC elevation prompts. This was addressed twofold, as far as I understand: 1) Application developers were railroaded into best practices and forced not to do terrible design ideas, and 2) MS introduced a whole load of compatibility features such as virtualising folders transparently so when bad apps still tried to do bad things, it was securely captured and diverted around requiring a UAC elevation prompt. Regarding the stability issues, Vista's driver model was new when compared to XP. Naturally, the number of bugs in drivers increased initially but slowly settled down. Much of the '7 is more stable / faster than Vista' groupthink is the result of bad drivers getting better in the intervening years.
  - Rafert 10y ago
    Many consider Windows 7 to be Vista 'done right', but Vista paved the way for that to happen with breaking changes you described.
tedajax 10y ago
Lots of changes to things that broke a lot of existing applications and drivers and I don't know if it was software shops just dragging their feet or MS not giving them enough time to update their software but it was pretty messy for the first year or so.
majormajor 10y ago
Nvidia drivers in particular were terrible at first.
speeder 10y ago
Some stuff vista broke were never fixed even... 1. Vista disabled parallel ports direct access, new cnc machines, or people using old printers and scanners still use xp. 2. Vista removed support for directx before dx10... Microsoft realized later how shitty idea that was, but instead added dx9 and below emulation layer. The problem is that it only works almost 100% right on win 7, thus why many gamers still use it ( instead of 8+ where some good games are very buggy or slow ) 3. Vista audio model disallowed drivers to do anything that could be used to disable hdmi drm. As side effect all 3d sound cards stopped working properly. Lots of people blamed Creative and other sound card makers, that got generally screwed... now that this tech proved to be essential for vr gpu companies are doing workarounds, for example AMD has as selling point of TruAudio that it skips Windows normal audio stack.

ams6110 10y ago

Also wasn't that the release that had endless popup warnings asking permission for arcane things. Anyone who used it became trained to just click "Allow" a dozen times just to get on with what they wanted to do.

yuhong 10y ago
OP already mentioned UAC.
NamTaf 10y ago
The issue was chiefly that XP didn't enforce good programming practices (storing user info in /Program Files/ was rife and one of many issues). Introducing the UAC security structure meant that suddenly all of these applications tried to do things that triggered UAC elevation prompts. This was addressed twofold, as far as I understand: 1) Application developers were railroaded into best practices and forced not to do terrible design ideas, and 2) MS introduced a whole load of compatibility features such as virtualising folders transparently so when bad apps still tried to do bad things, it was securely captured and diverted around requiring a UAC elevation prompt. Regarding the stability issues, Vista's driver model was new when compared to XP. Naturally, the number of bugs in drivers increased initially but slowly settled down. Much of the '7 is more stable / faster than Vista' groupthink is the result of bad drivers getting better in the intervening years.
- Rafert 10y ago
  Many consider Windows 7 to be Vista 'done right', but Vista paved the way for that to happen with breaking changes you described.

tedajax 10y ago

Lots of changes to things that broke a lot of existing applications and drivers and I don't know if it was software shops just dragging their feet or MS not giving them enough time to update their software but it was pretty messy for the first year or so.

majormajor 10y ago

Nvidia drivers in particular were terrible at first.

speeder 10y ago

Some stuff vista broke were never fixed even... 1. Vista disabled parallel ports direct access, new cnc machines, or people using old printers and scanners still use xp. 2. Vista removed support for directx before dx10... Microsoft realized later how shitty idea that was, but instead added dx9 and below emulation layer. The problem is that it only works almost 100% right on win 7, thus why many gamers still use it ( instead of 8+ where some good games are very buggy or slow ) 3. Vista audio model disallowed drivers to do anything that could be used to disable hdmi drm. As side effect all 3d sound cards stopped working properly. Lots of people blamed Creative and other sound card makers, that got generally screwed... now that this tech proved to be essential for vr gpu companies are doing workarounds, for example AMD has as selling point of TruAudio that it skips Windows normal audio stack.