18 ms·

Vista was amazing. I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation. 1. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers. nVidia alon

by tjoff 9y ago

Vista was amazing. I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation. 1. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers. nVidia alone (which only has niche hardware) themselves stood for the majority of Vista BSODs. And no printer or scanner company had probably written a device driver in a decade now so it took another 5 years for them to catch up (and they just continued creating bloat ever since). Yes there were major architectural changes but this was the perfect opportunity since it was the first MS (consumer) mainstream 64 bit OS (I don't count the 64 bit version XP). Unfortunately the driver situation made things rather different between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of windows, this did not help. 2. Pre-fetch/super-fetch or whatever they called it was WAY to aggressive. If you had a decent amount of RAM on launch day, or just a new regular computer 6 months after launch, the pre-fetching algorithms were so aggressive that they completely overloaded the harddrives that perform terrible with that random access load. It meant that the first 10 minutes after boot was spent trying to speed up that you might want to do at the extreme cost of slowing down things you actually wanted to do. Yes they were supposed to be run with low priority but it really exposed how bad spinning harddrives are at multitasking. If doing one task takes 1s, doing two tasks each taking 1s will now take 9 seconds if run in parallel etc. After enough time this wasn't a problem as all your freely available RAM had been used up by prefetch or actual programs. If you seldom rebooted you never had to worry about it. But the regular user wants to use the computer right away after boot and will only remember the agonizing slowness of trying to start the browser and office applications after boot. Compared to Vista, Windows 7 was just a new (much better) taskbar, better tuned prefetch and with the very important difference that by the time Windows 7 arrived the drivers had matured and many of them even supported 64 bit systems... But that was all that was needed for Vista to be seen as a disaster and Windows 7 an unparalleled success.

gattr 9y ago
I went with Vista in 2008 (having 4 GiB RAM) and never had a reason to complain; in my case, everything from drivers to games just worked. I liked the Aero and UAC. After a few years I permanently switched to Linux, but kept using Vista for compiling some projects for Windows under MSYS2 (until MSYS2 stopped supporting it).
frik 9y ago
Win 7 is basically Vista Service Pack 1. Several minor things like the slow-as-hell copy-routine of Vista got reverted back to almost XP level-speed with Win7. Unfortunately the Advanced Search dialog of Vista got removed in Win7. Most Vista problems were third party device drivers (blue screens), first (still new) mainstream 64bit OS and the related issues w 32bit and lack up 16bit support, and the vastly increased memory usage because wrong vision (consume all memory while idle is okay). To this day the Win7 is arguably the best OS (supported til 2020), followed by the aging XP.
- mnl 9y ago
  I'm very happy with 8.1 (support until 2023)+Classic Shell+Classic Explorer (no breadcrumbs)+MacType (sane font rasterizer).
Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
Apart from the general slowness and crashes caused by the issues you mention, I remember UAC was way too intrusive (sometimes you would see 4 or 5 alerts in a row that would monopolize your screen), copying files was slow as a snail an tended to outright crash for large sets of files, and suspend never really worked in my laptop. Anyway, how is a consumer product that provides a bad experience to the user (regardless of the reasons) "amazing"?
- angelsl 9y ago
  The "improved" aka "less annoying" UAC that we have by default now is as good as no UAC [1]. [1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160816-00/?p=94105 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160816-00/?p=...
  - BillinghamJ 9y ago
    But noisy UAC ends up being ignored completely by users - there's a very fine line to walk in order to ensure that it protects truly sensitive actions and is recognised by users as such.
  - JBiserkov 9y ago
    >As Larry Osterman noted, UAC is not a security feature. It's a convenience feature that acts as a forcing function to get software developers to get their act together. What a great new perspective.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I don't know how it looks like nowadays, but I remember Apple forums used to have questions how to run as root to avoid having to deal with such dialogs.
  - mixedCase 9y ago
    Loving how the tone of the article is more about "you dumb users" and not "our architecture is so shit we couldn't implement a feature so we just lied to our users instead".
  - 9y ago
bambax 9y ago
The problem with Vista was mismanagement of expectations. The ad campaign featured people spotting deer at dawn from their home office, and the message was, this will completely change your life and bring about your inner sense of wonder, as if you were born again, a new person in a brave new world. In reality, it was an OS upgrade that didn't work too well and that was more-or-less forced on you if you bought a new device, while at the same time XP continued to work just fine on all your older PCs. People were disappointed, upset and angry. All other things being equal, a little more humility and a lower profile would have helped.
- presspot 9y ago
  It was Marketing's fault!
  - code_sloth 9y ago
    Most things are.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
      Hyper-concise history of Western Civ, centuries XVIII-XXI ...
katastic 9y ago
Windows 10 is still terrible in that regard. Like, laughably bad. 1. I dare you to try it on a computer with a 5400 RPM hard drive. A fresh installation will spend the majority of its time sitting around with 100% disk usage as telemetry, superfetch, defender and more all eat up the entire ~2M/s hard drive bandwidth for more than 30 minutes after boot. And then halfway through your day, it'll decide to start recompiling .NET, or some other package with zero user notification and your computer will come to a halt. But hey, you're resourceful right? Just disable those services! Nope, too bad. Every version of Windows (including creators updates) have made it harder and harder for a user to disable features that break. Services get moved to TRUSTEDINSTALLER, an account that you can't override. Those services get restarted without asking you. Some as few as a couple hours. And Windows Defender will restart itself, and the before-last creators update KNEW people were disabling it so they moved the link in Metro/settings to be more obscure. 2. I just spent Friday for a client trying to "fix" Windows for Microsoft and failed. He bought a "Windows 10" laptop with a 30 GB SSD drive. Too bad, Window alone, took 97% of the entire hard drive. I removed literally every application (including 1 GB avast) except for Chrome and Windows 10. Every time I removed space, removed the hibernation file, removed any and all disk cleanup stuff... Windows would then fill it with patches. It also had a 2.6 GB "C:\recovery" folder. I checked online and they said "Feel free to delete it, it's from an old OS." I tried deleting it, no permissions--even as an admin. I went in, changed the owner from the glorious TRUSTEDINSTALLER and made myself the owner of all the files. I deleted some files, but one file refused to delete. The file? 2.6 GB. It said this file was open in "Windows Provisioning". I checked Windows 10 backups, restorepoints, file history, all that jazz. Zero. I check online. Maybe I'm insane. What are the Windows 10 requirements for hard drive space? Oh yeah, 15 GB. So there are, "Lies, damned lies, and Windows hardware requirements." Meanwhile, Windows 10 keeps spamming that "You need to free up space to continue downloading windows updates!!!" Really? REALLY? Thanks for the update. I download Process Explorer. They say find the open search and find the file handle of the file open. I do it. ZERO RESULTS. I download a tool that lets you delete a file on reboot before a program will acquire the file lock. It queues it up. It runs. It fails. Still NOTHING in services.msc that has Provisioning in the name. Okay, change gears. ALL they want, is to freakin' install Office 356 on their craptop. They've got an SD card with a 32 GB card. By now, after clearing up at least 4 GB, C: is now down to 100MB free. I download the 5 MB Office auto-installer. It fails with a pop UNDER error that you don't notice at first under the loading screen. Okay, instead of giving you a description, it gives you an obscure error code. Clicking it at least gives you the KB for "out of disk space." Lovely. I load up the Microsoft website, I find an alternative downloads link. I find the offline installer. But back to task at hand! I load up the same link on this slugger of a Windows laptop and I go "Fine, I'll download it to the SD." But wait, sorry! Thanks to the ultra-progressive, consumer-friendly Microsoft, they're too forward-thinking to let you have a download link. No, you get a Javascript button. It goes right into the full drive and fails. Okay, control click? Nope, Javascript. Okay, load up chrome settings and change where the default save location is and point it to the SD card. I download it for ~40 minutes. Why? Because it's 4.6 FREAKING GIG for the offline Office suite. What basically boils down to an e-mail client, and word processor, is larger than an entire Linux distro with apps. (<-Yeah yeah, there's more apps, but I'm pissed at this point so I'm taking comedic liberty here.) So I wait, and it finally downloads to the SD card, and at 99%, it stops and goes "download failed." There must be some Chrome bug with temporary space or something. Well! I'm not defeated yet--this is my job and I'm paid for results. I've got a USB flash drive and my Linux laptop (read: running an OS that actually works and can be configured and fixed by the end user). I go to the same website as before with my Linux netbook. But wait, the page... it's... different? Everything is the same except that wonderful offline installer link? They removed from the page. That's right. Go there with Windows, and then Linux, and go to same Microsoft download links and they will intentionally hide the ISO links and only give you the auto-installer link to ensure you're only going to run it on a Windows system. So customer friendly! (They do the same thing with Windows 10 ISOs, try it out.) At that point, the client's laptop owner had to drive back 3+ hours to his office location so he had to take his laptop back. I spent at least half a work day.. trying to (fight Microsoft) to free some space... on a machine that 100% meets Windows system requirements. Thanks Microsoft. I wonder why do all my game and app dev on a Linux box these days. It's almost like I like feeling like I own the machine I paid for. Could you imagine having to go through all of these anti-consumer, anti-solution when doing hardware upgrades? What if you couldn't release the case on your machine without getting a "poweruser" license key from HP first? After all, they're just trying to protect you and they know how to run their hardware better than you. The more you look at that analogy, it really becomes insane how much we let Microsoft get away with bricking our own machines. The answer to a working machine should never be, "throw it out and buy a new one" when simply changing a config setting (if you were allowed to modify those registry values--sorry!) would suffice. "I see you're trying to turn your SSD onto ACPI mode. Have you purchased an Enterprise SSD license yet?"
proactivesvcs 9y ago
I'm a small fish, but all of the customers who purchased a Windows Vista computer from me found Vista a joy to use. Their drivers worked, their programs worked and the machines were fast. I think a much stronger reason for the bad rep would be that so many big-name labels sold Vista machines that were woefully under-powered and then loaded them with bloatware. I recall visiting a few customers who had new Vista computers from big brands and paid me to upgrade them within the first week of owning them!
- TimJYoung 9y ago
  You are 100% correct. I remember friends buying both desktops and laptops at the time that essentially contained XP-targeted processor/memory configurations, but instead now were shipped with 32-bit Vista. It was a perfect recipe for bad performance out of the gate, and that's before you even get into the pre-loaded McAfee, etc.
- mirekrusin 9y ago
  Exactly. This issue is being discussed a lot and nothing is being done to fight it. Microsoft and Google with Android - where the same issue can be seen - should step in with more proactive approach to solve this problem. I don't have a solution but they should probably use some business incentives and possibly something directly from OS like built in benchmark scores/graphs, ideally compared to bare bones for the device so everybody can see how much performance you loose by getting all those "features" preinstalled.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    >Google with Android A lot of the bloat on Android phones I see is from Google, apps you can't uninstall without hacking. My Huawei had a few apps from the manufacturer, but they were removable - there's just under 20 Google Apps that came preinstalled many [most?] of which can't be removed.
    - jchw 9y ago
      In what sense are the Google apps bloated? When not running, many of them don't do anything.
taneq 9y ago
Microsoft has always (as far as I can see) alternated between focus on core tech and focus on user experience. Vista was a heavy tech push and so the user experience and polish suffered a bit. 7 was entirely focused on user experience and so it was awesome to use, but it wouldn't have been possible if not for Vista.
- frik 9y ago
  Yes, that era ended with Win7. Win8, Win8.1, Win10 ... not so much, hostile to the user, bad UI, sends data home, a train wreck, and the forced update, don't get me started. If they ever want to turn around, they need to make a u-turn and fire the responsible guys asap. And revert back to Win7 and WinAPI. (Yes the underpinning is still WinNT based and might be a slight improvement, but contains so many bad decisions like whitelisting various phone home IPs in kernel mode network driver, that's it's time to stop and revert). This Metro/Silverlight, Universal nonesense doesn't fly anyway, a store without apps. My bet is on Google Fuchsia (or Android, ChromeOS) to take over desktop til 2020.
zerr 9y ago
I prefer Vista's taskbar - where running apps are grouped together.
- GordonS 9y ago
  You can do this on Windows 7 and Windows 10 too. Actually, I think it's the default, because it's one of the first things I disable whenever I get a new machine (I'm not a fan)! I'm on mobile now, but from memory you right click the start button and go into taskbar settings.
  - kibwen 9y ago
    As I recall, the only way to group taskbar icons in 7 requires you to also display window titles in the taskbar, which is endlessly annoying; the way to work around this is to enable grouped icons/window titles and then edit your registry to impose a max pixel width on taskbar buttons so that the titles are unseen.
    - jenscow 9y ago
      It's grouped by default on 10, and you can have the title on or off. Personally, I have both set to "only when full". I miss that feature on Cinnamon.
    - efdee 9y ago
      It's been a while, but I'm quite sure that when I ran Windows 7, I had grouped, icon-only taskbar buttons.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - zerr 9y ago
    Sorry, I meant taskbar similar to e.g. WinXP - where running apps are at one side, and icons (quick launch) at another side of the taskbar. It is possible to show quick launch on Win7 as well but icon/button sizes are different and somewhat ugly. As for "grouping" (into one button) - yes, that the first thing I turn off as well.
johnchristopher 9y ago
> Compared to Vista, Windows 7 was just a new (much better) taskbar, better tuned prefetch and with the very important difference that by the time Windows 7 arrived the drivers had matured and many of them even supported 64 bit systems... But that was all that was needed for Vista to be seen as a disaster and Windows 7 an unparalleled success. Still, Vista was a disaster. I remember a conversation I had with a MS engineer at that time: - Vista is like, the foundations for the good things to come. If you want a solid house, you dig solid foundations. - I am buying a house, not just pillars in the ground. (It was the same with the w3c specs: "maybe mozilla and opera are the ones misreading the box model spec and IE has it right", me "ms is on the board...").
- deaddodo 9y ago
  I'm not quite sure how to interpret your last comment. You prefer the IE box model? Or you're saying they did it right from the get go? Because quirks mode was abandoned and everyone uses the Moz/W3C model now. A better example would be file line endings, where Microsoft did get it right (\r\n) and all the other OS's screwed up using just \r or \n.
  - niftich 9y ago
    The W3C box model became standard and IE was criticized for its quirky noncompliant behavior [1], but then many years later 'box-sizing: border-box' was introduced and widely praised and adopted by frameworks [2][3]; it's funny how things change. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_box_model_bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_box_model_bu... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/box-sizing https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/box-sizing [3] https://css-tricks.com/international-box-sizing-awareness-day/ https://css-tricks.com/international-box-sizing-awareness-da...
    - gsnedders 9y ago
      > then many years later 'box-sizing: border-box' was introduced and widely praised and adopted by frameworks Well, IE implemented their version of the box model in '97 (coincidently, NN4 did the same); the box-sizing property was first proposed in 1999[1], and first appeared in a draft in 1999[2], and implemented in Gecko in 1999[3] and in IE5/Mac in 2000[4]. That's two years from IE/NN shipping the non-standard box model (the standard one was defined before IE4 and NN4 shipped) to having a property to toggle between them. To me, that isn't "many years". Really what makes it seem like many years is the fact that IE didn't implement box-sizing until IE8 which shipped in 2009. [1]: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-css-wg/1999JanMar/0201.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-css-wg/1999JanMar/0... (sorry, W3C MO space, but I think at this point nobody cares if I mention that publicly) [2]: https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-css3-userint-19990916#box-sizing https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-css3-userint-19990916#box-sizi... [3]: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko/commit/3ee32d59158a036bd6673c72ed29b137f1fa78bb https://github.com/mozilla/gecko/commit/3ee32d59158a036bd667... [4]: http://tantek.com/notes/csssupport.html http://tantek.com/notes/csssupport.html
jmkni 9y ago
Another reason Windows Vista did so badly was that it really needed a clean install to make it work properly. This is true of all Windows versions, but was particularly true of Vista, and of course the reality was: * Very few people carry out a clean install when they get a new computer. This is as true today as it was ten years ago * Hardware manufacturers loaded the PC's up with terribly written adware before shipping (this situation has improved slightly) The requirements for Windows 10 aren't that much more than Vista, so, the average person would get their new Vista PC running on a Core 2 Duo/Pentium D and 1-4GB of DDR2 Ram, loaded up with crapware and not do a clean install, and it would run horribly. By the time Windows 7 came out, the PC manufacturers where writing slightly more efficient crapware, hardware was generally a bit more powerful, and they had fixed a tonne of bugs in the OS itself.
- scarface74 9y ago
  I can attest to the relatively low requirements of Windows 10. I'm running it on a circa 2008 Core 2 Duo with 4Gb of RAM. It's my Plex Server.
  - bwbw223 9y ago
    Windows... On a server? interesting
    - EpicEng 9y ago
      I am forced to host many of our services on Windows machines at work. I can attest there is nothing 'interesting' about it :)
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      It's not what GP was referring to, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server
    - scarface74 9y ago
      Not what I was originally referring to, but yes at work our entire system is 30+ Windows Servers running C# programs and services using Consul, Nomad, Mongo, Sql Server, and Memcached. Continuous integration and deployment is all done with Microsoft agents orchestrated by VSTS (Microsoft's hosted version of TFS). Yes we use git Easy to maintain and no performance issues.
acqq 9y ago
You forget the terrible issue with the inefficient windows management code, compared to the cleaned up Windows 7. And the problems in UI. And... In short, it was really good version to avoid, especially as an upgrade. On a new computer it could have been somewhat acceptable. But amazing... no.
mistersquid 9y ago
> I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation. > 1. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers. nVidia alone (which only has niche hardware) themselves stood for the majority of Vista BSODs. One of the things Fathi (OP author) writes is > [. . .] ecosystem partners hated [Vista] because they felt they didn’t have enough time to update and certify their drivers and applications as Vista was rushed out the door to compete with a resurgent Apple. This goes some way to mitigating the characterization of device manufacturers as terrible at writing drivers. When considered in the context of "a resurgent Apple", it also provides a counterpoint in the specific example of nVidia as a niche hardware manufacturer. 2006 was the year Vista was released, at that time, Apple was shipping the quad-core Xeon Mac Pro with macOS Leopard (later Snow Leopard) which shipped with an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video card. [0] I used this particular computer all the way through Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) and if memory serves, I had a handful of kernel panics over the course of 6 years. From all I could tell, nVidia's video card device drivers on Mac OS never interfered with daily operation (up 24/7 as it was also an authoritative DNS server for my personal domains). So, device manufacturers may be bad at writing drivers but those drivers also depend on stable and reliable APIs of the target OS, and such details have to be communicated between the two teams. Device drivers are an interface between host operating systems and hardware embedded systems. As such, the reliability of any device driver will depend on the sharing of information between the OS and device driver teams just as much, if not more, on the competence of the device driver engineers. [0] https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-quad-2.66-specs.html https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-qua... EDIT: remove extraneous words, a couple proper nouns where appropriate, punctuation.
Someone 9y ago
”It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers.” In their defense, Windows Driver Model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Driver_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Driver_Model) may make it possible to wring the last bit of performance out of a system, but it doesn’t make it easy to write a driver. Its documentation also was somewhat of the type “once you know what this page tries to tell you, you will be able to understand it” variety. It also didn’t help that new hardware frequently introduced new sleep state levels at the time.
cm2187 9y ago
I also remember it was too chatty (very much like Windows 10 now). You wouldn't spend a minute before the OS would ask you to authorise an outgoing connection or something else.
T-A 9y ago
I built a new PC in 2007, bought Vista Ultimate OEM, installed it and added all patches up to that point. Two things became immediately obvious: - As others have pointed out, UAC was way too active. Just about any application you cared to launch required permission dialogs to be clicked through - irritating to everybody, scary to most users, and quickly ineffective as everybody stopped reading and just reflexively went for the OK button. - Lots of legacy applications broke for the most trivial of reasons: they were written to store configuration and other data in their installation directory, which defaulted to "C:\Program Files". This worked fine on Windows 9x, which by default allows user-owned processes to do just about anything, but not on NT, where writing to Program Files requires elevation. So new Vista owners would click through a bunch of obnoxious UAC popups to install their favorite Windows applications, click through more UAC popups to launch them, and then watch them crash or mysteriously lose all their data. You got extra loser points if you went for the shiny new 64 bit version, in which case your legacy 32 bit application installer was more than likely to try its luck with "Program Files" instead of "Program Files (x86)". Would it really have been so terrible to leave the old directory alone and call the new one "Program Files (x64)"? None of this was terribly hard to fix if the application was still supported, but it did require the user to upgrade, often at a cost. Worse, if you were a small indie developer, releasing an upgrade now pretty much required buying an expensive certificate to sign it, lest UAC keep warning your users that they were launching an untrusted file from the scary internet. So lots of small free- and shareware apps which people loved were abandoned, undoing part of the Windows platform's greatest advantage: its large library of existing applications.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  > Would it really have been so terrible to leave the old directory alone and call the new one "Program Files (x64)"? Or alternatively, why was breaking them out required in the first place? To this day I frequently end up having to look in two places to find something, because it's never obvious which of the two Program Files it should be in. Pre-64-bit Windows there was only ever the one place. This is a permanent usability regression. And of course, I wouldn't even need to be digging through there in the first place if the Start menu launcher just worked, but no, they had to junk it up with Cortana, which is so incompetent it can't even find installed applications by name. More details on my Cortana rant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15758641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15758641
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
burnte 9y ago
You're completely right. UAC was too aggressive (they admitted that was their mistake) and a few other bits needed tuning but it was actually quite an improvement over XP. 7 was what it should have been. All those glitches though came from MS's far too aggressive and unrealistic plans for Vista. A couple years before it launched, 2003 I think, I was heavy in the Mozilla world, and had a high-ish profile in the community (I ran MozillaNews.org and was a long time triager). Robert Scoble tried to hire me to be a bridge between MS and Mozilla, a tech evangelist for features of Longhorn (as Vista was known then) that could help Mozilla, or really features that Mozilla could be a showcase for and be a tech ad for MS. I set aside my suspicions and gave it a try, learning about the technical side of Vista. I learned a lot, and wound up not taking the gig. I told him I didn't think these things has any real benefit to a cross platform application like Mozilla, and that I had real doubts they'd have any real impact on the market even if they were delivered, which I had strong doubts about. The three tentpoles MS wanted Mozilla to use were: 1. Avalon/WPF 2. Palladium 3. WinFS 1. I told Scoble that I saw no benefit in Avalon yet as in 2003/4 Mozilla wasn't really about to dedicate lots of time and attention to coding for some new graphics API that wouldn't be launched for years. He said it would be out much sooner. I said I had my doubts given it's rather early stage of development. 2. "Imagine users knowing their online banking and purchases are 100% secure thanks to the hardware and their OS!" I said I thought the idea was rubbish, a nonstarter, and I hoped it failed. 3. WinFS. My arguments were simple, "apps like this don't care about the FS. Plus, it'll never launch. I have zero faith this feature will be out before 2010. Filesystems are hard, and MS has a long history of cutting features to get products out the door. This is a prime target to be cut." He argued it was solid and amazing, etc, as a good tech evang should, but in the end I said no to the whole deal. I couldn't in good conscience try to push tech that I didn't believe in and didn't even think would ever release. They were hell bent on shoving all this and more in Longhorn, rather than a smaller release in 2004 and finish the other features later. And thus, we got Vista. Lots of great tech, rushed out the door, and poorly configured.
agumonkey 9y ago
win7 kernel had a few tweaks too IIRC I never liked Vista, can't say why but so far I think the UI/UX annoyed me. Everytime I boot Win7 I feel home (almost like NT5 or 95)
mtgx 9y ago
You forgot to mention how Vista skyrocketed the need for higher CPU/GPU/RAM resources, too, compared to XP (which also skyrocketed resources compared to Win98). I'm inclining to believe this was on purpose, and not just in a "we just want to make the OS prettier for users" way. I think there used to be a theory that Microsoft did this to help PC manufacturers and chip makers sell more hardware, too. Microsoft's mistake was that the resource requirements were too high compared to XP, so like 90% of the PCs running XP were useless when running Vista.

by tjoff 9y ago

gattr 9y ago

I went with Vista in 2008 (having 4 GiB RAM) and never had a reason to complain; in my case, everything from drivers to games just worked. I liked the Aero and UAC. After a few years I permanently switched to Linux, but kept using Vista for compiling some projects for Windows under MSYS2 (until MSYS2 stopped supporting it).

frik 9y ago

Win 7 is basically Vista Service Pack 1. Several minor things like the slow-as-hell copy-routine of Vista got reverted back to almost XP level-speed with Win7. Unfortunately the Advanced Search dialog of Vista got removed in Win7. Most Vista problems were third party device drivers (blue screens), first (still new) mainstream 64bit OS and the related issues w 32bit and lack up 16bit support, and the vastly increased memory usage because wrong vision (consume all memory while idle is okay). To this day the Win7 is arguably the best OS (supported til 2020), followed by the aging XP.

mnl 9y ago
I'm very happy with 8.1 (support until 2023)+Classic Shell+Classic Explorer (no breadcrumbs)+MacType (sane font rasterizer).

Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago

Apart from the general slowness and crashes caused by the issues you mention, I remember UAC was way too intrusive (sometimes you would see 4 or 5 alerts in a row that would monopolize your screen), copying files was slow as a snail an tended to outright crash for large sets of files, and suspend never really worked in my laptop. Anyway, how is a consumer product that provides a bad experience to the user (regardless of the reasons) "amazing"?

angelsl 9y ago
The "improved" aka "less annoying" UAC that we have by default now is as good as no UAC [1]. [1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160816-00/?p=94105 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160816-00/?p=...
- BillinghamJ 9y ago
  But noisy UAC ends up being ignored completely by users - there's a very fine line to walk in order to ensure that it protects truly sensitive actions and is recognised by users as such.
- JBiserkov 9y ago
  >As Larry Osterman noted, UAC is not a security feature. It's a convenience feature that acts as a forcing function to get software developers to get their act together. What a great new perspective.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I don't know how it looks like nowadays, but I remember Apple forums used to have questions how to run as root to avoid having to deal with such dialogs.
- mixedCase 9y ago
  Loving how the tone of the article is more about "you dumb users" and not "our architecture is so shit we couldn't implement a feature so we just lied to our users instead".
- 9y ago

bambax 9y ago

The problem with Vista was mismanagement of expectations. The ad campaign featured people spotting deer at dawn from their home office, and the message was, this will completely change your life and bring about your inner sense of wonder, as if you were born again, a new person in a brave new world. In reality, it was an OS upgrade that didn't work too well and that was more-or-less forced on you if you bought a new device, while at the same time XP continued to work just fine on all your older PCs. People were disappointed, upset and angry. All other things being equal, a little more humility and a lower profile would have helped.

presspot 9y ago
It was Marketing's fault!
- code_sloth 9y ago
  Most things are.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
    Hyper-concise history of Western Civ, centuries XVIII-XXI ...

katastic 9y ago

Windows 10 is still terrible in that regard. Like, laughably bad. 1. I dare you to try it on a computer with a 5400 RPM hard drive. A fresh installation will spend the majority of its time sitting around with 100% disk usage as telemetry, superfetch, defender and more all eat up the entire ~2M/s hard drive bandwidth for more than 30 minutes after boot. And then halfway through your day, it'll decide to start recompiling .NET, or some other package with zero user notification and your computer will come to a halt. But hey, you're resourceful right? Just disable those services! Nope, too bad. Every version of Windows (including creators updates) have made it harder and harder for a user to disable features that break. Services get moved to TRUSTEDINSTALLER, an account that you can't override. Those services get restarted without asking you. Some as few as a couple hours. And Windows Defender will restart itself, and the before-last creators update KNEW people were disabling it so they moved the link in Metro/settings to be more obscure. 2. I just spent Friday for a client trying to "fix" Windows for Microsoft and failed. He bought a "Windows 10" laptop with a 30 GB SSD drive. Too bad, Window alone, took 97% of the entire hard drive. I removed literally every application (including 1 GB avast) except for Chrome and Windows 10. Every time I removed space, removed the hibernation file, removed any and all disk cleanup stuff... Windows would then fill it with patches. It also had a 2.6 GB "C:\recovery" folder. I checked online and they said "Feel free to delete it, it's from an old OS." I tried deleting it, no permissions--even as an admin. I went in, changed the owner from the glorious TRUSTEDINSTALLER and made myself the owner of all the files. I deleted some files, but one file refused to delete. The file? 2.6 GB. It said this file was open in "Windows Provisioning". I checked Windows 10 backups, restorepoints, file history, all that jazz. Zero. I check online. Maybe I'm insane. What are the Windows 10 requirements for hard drive space? Oh yeah, 15 GB. So there are, "Lies, damned lies, and Windows hardware requirements." Meanwhile, Windows 10 keeps spamming that "You need to free up space to continue downloading windows updates!!!" Really? REALLY? Thanks for the update. I download Process Explorer. They say find the open search and find the file handle of the file open. I do it. ZERO RESULTS. I download a tool that lets you delete a file on reboot before a program will acquire the file lock. It queues it up. It runs. It fails. Still NOTHING in services.msc that has Provisioning in the name. Okay, change gears. ALL they want, is to freakin' install Office 356 on their craptop. They've got an SD card with a 32 GB card. By now, after clearing up at least 4 GB, C: is now down to 100MB free. I download the 5 MB Office auto-installer. It fails with a pop UNDER error that you don't notice at first under the loading screen. Okay, instead of giving you a description, it gives you an obscure error code. Clicking it at least gives you the KB for "out of disk space." Lovely. I load up the Microsoft website, I find an alternative downloads link. I find the offline installer. But back to task at hand! I load up the same link on this slugger of a Windows laptop and I go "Fine, I'll download it to the SD." But wait, sorry! Thanks to the ultra-progressive, consumer-friendly Microsoft, they're too forward-thinking to let you have a download link. No, you get a Javascript button. It goes right into the full drive and fails. Okay, control click? Nope, Javascript. Okay, load up chrome settings and change where the default save location is and point it to the SD card. I download it for ~40 minutes. Why? Because it's 4.6 FREAKING GIG for the offline Office suite. What basically boils down to an e-mail client, and word processor, is larger than an entire Linux distro with apps. (<-Yeah yeah, there's more apps, but I'm pissed at this point so I'm taking comedic liberty here.) So I wait, and it finally downloads to the SD card, and at 99%, it stops and goes "download failed." There must be some Chrome bug with temporary space or something. Well! I'm not defeated yet--this is my job and I'm paid for results. I've got a USB flash drive and my Linux laptop (read: running an OS that actually works and can be configured and fixed by the end user). I go to the same website as before with my Linux netbook. But wait, the page... it's... different? Everything is the same except that wonderful offline installer link? They removed from the page. That's right. Go there with Windows, and then Linux, and go to same Microsoft download links and they will intentionally hide the ISO links and only give you the auto-installer link to ensure you're only going to run it on a Windows system. So customer friendly! (They do the same thing with Windows 10 ISOs, try it out.) At that point, the client's laptop owner had to drive back 3+ hours to his office location so he had to take his laptop back. I spent at least half a work day.. trying to (fight Microsoft) to free some space... on a machine that 100% meets Windows system requirements. Thanks Microsoft. I wonder why do all my game and app dev on a Linux box these days. It's almost like I like feeling like I own the machine I paid for. Could you imagine having to go through all of these anti-consumer, anti-solution when doing hardware upgrades? What if you couldn't release the case on your machine without getting a "poweruser" license key from HP first? After all, they're just trying to protect you and they know how to run their hardware better than you. The more you look at that analogy, it really becomes insane how much we let Microsoft get away with bricking our own machines. The answer to a working machine should never be, "throw it out and buy a new one" when simply changing a config setting (if you were allowed to modify those registry values--sorry!) would suffice. "I see you're trying to turn your SSD onto ACPI mode. Have you purchased an Enterprise SSD license yet?"

proactivesvcs 9y ago

I'm a small fish, but all of the customers who purchased a Windows Vista computer from me found Vista a joy to use. Their drivers worked, their programs worked and the machines were fast. I think a much stronger reason for the bad rep would be that so many big-name labels sold Vista machines that were woefully under-powered and then loaded them with bloatware. I recall visiting a few customers who had new Vista computers from big brands and paid me to upgrade them within the first week of owning them!

TimJYoung 9y ago
You are 100% correct. I remember friends buying both desktops and laptops at the time that essentially contained XP-targeted processor/memory configurations, but instead now were shipped with 32-bit Vista. It was a perfect recipe for bad performance out of the gate, and that's before you even get into the pre-loaded McAfee, etc.
mirekrusin 9y ago
Exactly. This issue is being discussed a lot and nothing is being done to fight it. Microsoft and Google with Android - where the same issue can be seen - should step in with more proactive approach to solve this problem. I don't have a solution but they should probably use some business incentives and possibly something directly from OS like built in benchmark scores/graphs, ideally compared to bare bones for the device so everybody can see how much performance you loose by getting all those "features" preinstalled.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  >Google with Android A lot of the bloat on Android phones I see is from Google, apps you can't uninstall without hacking. My Huawei had a few apps from the manufacturer, but they were removable - there's just under 20 Google Apps that came preinstalled many [most?] of which can't be removed.
  - jchw 9y ago
    In what sense are the Google apps bloated? When not running, many of them don't do anything.

taneq 9y ago

Microsoft has always (as far as I can see) alternated between focus on core tech and focus on user experience. Vista was a heavy tech push and so the user experience and polish suffered a bit. 7 was entirely focused on user experience and so it was awesome to use, but it wouldn't have been possible if not for Vista.

frik 9y ago
Yes, that era ended with Win7. Win8, Win8.1, Win10 ... not so much, hostile to the user, bad UI, sends data home, a train wreck, and the forced update, don't get me started. If they ever want to turn around, they need to make a u-turn and fire the responsible guys asap. And revert back to Win7 and WinAPI. (Yes the underpinning is still WinNT based and might be a slight improvement, but contains so many bad decisions like whitelisting various phone home IPs in kernel mode network driver, that's it's time to stop and revert). This Metro/Silverlight, Universal nonesense doesn't fly anyway, a store without apps. My bet is on Google Fuchsia (or Android, ChromeOS) to take over desktop til 2020.

zerr 9y ago

I prefer Vista's taskbar - where running apps are grouped together.

GordonS 9y ago
You can do this on Windows 7 and Windows 10 too. Actually, I think it's the default, because it's one of the first things I disable whenever I get a new machine (I'm not a fan)! I'm on mobile now, but from memory you right click the start button and go into taskbar settings.
- kibwen 9y ago
  As I recall, the only way to group taskbar icons in 7 requires you to also display window titles in the taskbar, which is endlessly annoying; the way to work around this is to enable grouped icons/window titles and then edit your registry to impose a max pixel width on taskbar buttons so that the titles are unseen.
  - jenscow 9y ago
    It's grouped by default on 10, and you can have the title on or off. Personally, I have both set to "only when full". I miss that feature on Cinnamon.
  - efdee 9y ago
    It's been a while, but I'm quite sure that when I ran Windows 7, I had grouped, icon-only taskbar buttons.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- zerr 9y ago
  Sorry, I meant taskbar similar to e.g. WinXP - where running apps are at one side, and icons (quick launch) at another side of the taskbar. It is possible to show quick launch on Win7 as well but icon/button sizes are different and somewhat ugly. As for "grouping" (into one button) - yes, that the first thing I turn off as well.

johnchristopher 9y ago

> Compared to Vista, Windows 7 was just a new (much better) taskbar, better tuned prefetch and with the very important difference that by the time Windows 7 arrived the drivers had matured and many of them even supported 64 bit systems... But that was all that was needed for Vista to be seen as a disaster and Windows 7 an unparalleled success. Still, Vista was a disaster. I remember a conversation I had with a MS engineer at that time: - Vista is like, the foundations for the good things to come. If you want a solid house, you dig solid foundations. - I am buying a house, not just pillars in the ground. (It was the same with the w3c specs: "maybe mozilla and opera are the ones misreading the box model spec and IE has it right", me "ms is on the board...").

deaddodo 9y ago
I'm not quite sure how to interpret your last comment. You prefer the IE box model? Or you're saying they did it right from the get go? Because quirks mode was abandoned and everyone uses the Moz/W3C model now. A better example would be file line endings, where Microsoft did get it right (\r\n) and all the other OS's screwed up using just \r or \n.
- niftich 9y ago
  The W3C box model became standard and IE was criticized for its quirky noncompliant behavior [1], but then many years later 'box-sizing: border-box' was introduced and widely praised and adopted by frameworks [2][3]; it's funny how things change. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_box_model_bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_box_model_bu... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/box-sizing https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/box-sizing [3] https://css-tricks.com/international-box-sizing-awareness-day/ https://css-tricks.com/international-box-sizing-awareness-da...
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    > then many years later 'box-sizing: border-box' was introduced and widely praised and adopted by frameworks Well, IE implemented their version of the box model in '97 (coincidently, NN4 did the same); the box-sizing property was first proposed in 1999[1], and first appeared in a draft in 1999[2], and implemented in Gecko in 1999[3] and in IE5/Mac in 2000[4]. That's two years from IE/NN shipping the non-standard box model (the standard one was defined before IE4 and NN4 shipped) to having a property to toggle between them. To me, that isn't "many years". Really what makes it seem like many years is the fact that IE didn't implement box-sizing until IE8 which shipped in 2009. [1]: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-css-wg/1999JanMar/0201.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-css-wg/1999JanMar/0... (sorry, W3C MO space, but I think at this point nobody cares if I mention that publicly) [2]: https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-css3-userint-19990916#box-sizing https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-css3-userint-19990916#box-sizi... [3]: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko/commit/3ee32d59158a036bd6673c72ed29b137f1fa78bb https://github.com/mozilla/gecko/commit/3ee32d59158a036bd667... [4]: http://tantek.com/notes/csssupport.html http://tantek.com/notes/csssupport.html

jmkni 9y ago

Another reason Windows Vista did so badly was that it really needed a clean install to make it work properly. This is true of all Windows versions, but was particularly true of Vista, and of course the reality was: * Very few people carry out a clean install when they get a new computer. This is as true today as it was ten years ago * Hardware manufacturers loaded the PC's up with terribly written adware before shipping (this situation has improved slightly) The requirements for Windows 10 aren't that much more than Vista, so, the average person would get their new Vista PC running on a Core 2 Duo/Pentium D and 1-4GB of DDR2 Ram, loaded up with crapware and not do a clean install, and it would run horribly. By the time Windows 7 came out, the PC manufacturers where writing slightly more efficient crapware, hardware was generally a bit more powerful, and they had fixed a tonne of bugs in the OS itself.

scarface74 9y ago
I can attest to the relatively low requirements of Windows 10. I'm running it on a circa 2008 Core 2 Duo with 4Gb of RAM. It's my Plex Server.
- bwbw223 9y ago
  Windows... On a server? interesting
  - EpicEng 9y ago
    I am forced to host many of our services on Windows machines at work. I can attest there is nothing 'interesting' about it :)
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    It's not what GP was referring to, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server
  - scarface74 9y ago
    Not what I was originally referring to, but yes at work our entire system is 30+ Windows Servers running C# programs and services using Consul, Nomad, Mongo, Sql Server, and Memcached. Continuous integration and deployment is all done with Microsoft agents orchestrated by VSTS (Microsoft's hosted version of TFS). Yes we use git Easy to maintain and no performance issues.

acqq 9y ago

You forget the terrible issue with the inefficient windows management code, compared to the cleaned up Windows 7. And the problems in UI. And... In short, it was really good version to avoid, especially as an upgrade. On a new computer it could have been somewhat acceptable. But amazing... no.

mistersquid 9y ago

> I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation. > 1. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers. nVidia alone (which only has niche hardware) themselves stood for the majority of Vista BSODs. One of the things Fathi (OP author) writes is > [. . .] ecosystem partners hated [Vista] because they felt they didn’t have enough time to update and certify their drivers and applications as Vista was rushed out the door to compete with a resurgent Apple. This goes some way to mitigating the characterization of device manufacturers as terrible at writing drivers. When considered in the context of "a resurgent Apple", it also provides a counterpoint in the specific example of nVidia as a niche hardware manufacturer. 2006 was the year Vista was released, at that time, Apple was shipping the quad-core Xeon Mac Pro with macOS Leopard (later Snow Leopard) which shipped with an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video card. [0] I used this particular computer all the way through Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) and if memory serves, I had a handful of kernel panics over the course of 6 years. From all I could tell, nVidia's video card device drivers on Mac OS never interfered with daily operation (up 24/7 as it was also an authoritative DNS server for my personal domains). So, device manufacturers may be bad at writing drivers but those drivers also depend on stable and reliable APIs of the target OS, and such details have to be communicated between the two teams. Device drivers are an interface between host operating systems and hardware embedded systems. As such, the reliability of any device driver will depend on the sharing of information between the OS and device driver teams just as much, if not more, on the competence of the device driver engineers. [0] https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-quad-2.66-specs.html https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/specs/mac-pro-qua... EDIT: remove extraneous words, a couple proper nouns where appropriate, punctuation.

Someone 9y ago

”It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers.” In their defense, Windows Driver Model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Driver_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Driver_Model) may make it possible to wring the last bit of performance out of a system, but it doesn’t make it easy to write a driver. Its documentation also was somewhat of the type “once you know what this page tries to tell you, you will be able to understand it” variety. It also didn’t help that new hardware frequently introduced new sleep state levels at the time.

cm2187 9y ago

I also remember it was too chatty (very much like Windows 10 now). You wouldn't spend a minute before the OS would ask you to authorise an outgoing connection or something else.

T-A 9y ago

I built a new PC in 2007, bought Vista Ultimate OEM, installed it and added all patches up to that point. Two things became immediately obvious: - As others have pointed out, UAC was way too active. Just about any application you cared to launch required permission dialogs to be clicked through - irritating to everybody, scary to most users, and quickly ineffective as everybody stopped reading and just reflexively went for the OK button. - Lots of legacy applications broke for the most trivial of reasons: they were written to store configuration and other data in their installation directory, which defaulted to "C:\Program Files". This worked fine on Windows 9x, which by default allows user-owned processes to do just about anything, but not on NT, where writing to Program Files requires elevation. So new Vista owners would click through a bunch of obnoxious UAC popups to install their favorite Windows applications, click through more UAC popups to launch them, and then watch them crash or mysteriously lose all their data. You got extra loser points if you went for the shiny new 64 bit version, in which case your legacy 32 bit application installer was more than likely to try its luck with "Program Files" instead of "Program Files (x86)". Would it really have been so terrible to leave the old directory alone and call the new one "Program Files (x64)"? None of this was terribly hard to fix if the application was still supported, but it did require the user to upgrade, often at a cost. Worse, if you were a small indie developer, releasing an upgrade now pretty much required buying an expensive certificate to sign it, lest UAC keep warning your users that they were launching an untrusted file from the scary internet. So lots of small free- and shareware apps which people loved were abandoned, undoing part of the Windows platform's greatest advantage: its large library of existing applications.

CydeWeys 9y ago
> Would it really have been so terrible to leave the old directory alone and call the new one "Program Files (x64)"? Or alternatively, why was breaking them out required in the first place? To this day I frequently end up having to look in two places to find something, because it's never obvious which of the two Program Files it should be in. Pre-64-bit Windows there was only ever the one place. This is a permanent usability regression. And of course, I wouldn't even need to be digging through there in the first place if the Start menu launcher just worked, but no, they had to junk it up with Cortana, which is so incompetent it can't even find installed applications by name. More details on my Cortana rant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15758641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15758641

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

burnte 9y ago

You're completely right. UAC was too aggressive (they admitted that was their mistake) and a few other bits needed tuning but it was actually quite an improvement over XP. 7 was what it should have been. All those glitches though came from MS's far too aggressive and unrealistic plans for Vista. A couple years before it launched, 2003 I think, I was heavy in the Mozilla world, and had a high-ish profile in the community (I ran MozillaNews.org and was a long time triager). Robert Scoble tried to hire me to be a bridge between MS and Mozilla, a tech evangelist for features of Longhorn (as Vista was known then) that could help Mozilla, or really features that Mozilla could be a showcase for and be a tech ad for MS. I set aside my suspicions and gave it a try, learning about the technical side of Vista. I learned a lot, and wound up not taking the gig. I told him I didn't think these things has any real benefit to a cross platform application like Mozilla, and that I had real doubts they'd have any real impact on the market even if they were delivered, which I had strong doubts about. The three tentpoles MS wanted Mozilla to use were: 1. Avalon/WPF 2. Palladium 3. WinFS 1. I told Scoble that I saw no benefit in Avalon yet as in 2003/4 Mozilla wasn't really about to dedicate lots of time and attention to coding for some new graphics API that wouldn't be launched for years. He said it would be out much sooner. I said I had my doubts given it's rather early stage of development. 2. "Imagine users knowing their online banking and purchases are 100% secure thanks to the hardware and their OS!" I said I thought the idea was rubbish, a nonstarter, and I hoped it failed. 3. WinFS. My arguments were simple, "apps like this don't care about the FS. Plus, it'll never launch. I have zero faith this feature will be out before 2010. Filesystems are hard, and MS has a long history of cutting features to get products out the door. This is a prime target to be cut." He argued it was solid and amazing, etc, as a good tech evang should, but in the end I said no to the whole deal. I couldn't in good conscience try to push tech that I didn't believe in and didn't even think would ever release. They were hell bent on shoving all this and more in Longhorn, rather than a smaller release in 2004 and finish the other features later. And thus, we got Vista. Lots of great tech, rushed out the door, and poorly configured.

agumonkey 9y ago

win7 kernel had a few tweaks too IIRC I never liked Vista, can't say why but so far I think the UI/UX annoyed me. Everytime I boot Win7 I feel home (almost like NT5 or 95)

mtgx 9y ago

You forgot to mention how Vista skyrocketed the need for higher CPU/GPU/RAM resources, too, compared to XP (which also skyrocketed resources compared to Win98). I'm inclining to believe this was on purpose, and not just in a "we just want to make the OS prettier for users" way. I think there used to be a theory that Microsoft did this to help PC manufacturers and chip makers sell more hardware, too. Microsoft's mistake was that the resource requirements were too high compared to XP, so like 90% of the PCs running XP were useless when running Vista.