Windows Vista - Your experience and opinion?

By Ian W
in Microsoft (Windows)

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kInG aLeXo

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It was fast when first installed, then had this weird tendency to become slower after each reboot. After two weeks it became too slow to be usable. Re-installed and exact same thing happenned. Never installed it again.

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Grand Master

Max Norris

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Stayed with XP until SP1, too many immature driver issues, some existing software had a few compatibility issues, etc at release. Was actually decent once SP2 rolled around, haven't looked back to XP since then. Kicked to the curb and forgotten with 7.

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spaceelf

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Sadly this trend has continued, especially in Windows 8 to the point where its just one big mess now going through system and user settings.

It's actually a lot quicker in some respects http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/shortcuts-and-surprises-in-the-windows-8-consumer-preview/4587

And search is still just typing as soon as you bring up the Start screen, since people like to bring up the going to the Charms bar thing.

But anyway, nevermind since this topics about something else entirely.

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Anibal P

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Just like Win8, Vista is/was hated upon because the so called geeks and nerds are hostile to change, there was nothing wrong with Vista that the hardware vendors slowness in updating drivers could have fixed, otherwise it was a huge improvement over WinXP

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Detection

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Here is my opinion of Windows Vista

It's not a matter of IF Windows Vista will fail to install updates but WHEN!

It also more often than not takes FOREVER to shut down.

I used to shutdown my freshly installed and updated Vista, working exactly as I wanted it, sleep, wake up and boot up, and now I have no 3G Connection any more, no way to create a new one because the services it depended on are disabled and no way to enable them again as the services that THEY depend on are also disabled

Reinstall Vista, shutdown, sleep, wake, boot, no connection again

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REM2000

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Vista was fixed primarily after SP1,

However before that there were some nasty bugs,

High memory use,

problems with wifi, not finding wifi, not connecting correctly, tried on 3 different laptops, HP, Lenovo and Dell

Problems when waking a computer from sleep

Problem when playing video would reduce the network connection down so background copies would near enough freeze.

Search was slow and didn't pull back good results.

Generally resource requirements for Vista were high for the time, it should have been optimized a little more before being brought to the market.

Im sure there was something about memory sticks as well, but i can't remember now.

I tried Vista in beta and i really wanted it to be a success as i really didn't like XP either (i love Windows 2000 and used it till it became unsupported/impractical). However RTM was a beta release, this is discounting the various versions, the painful/confusing mess of OEM partners and the Vista capable mislead.

Windows 7 was a massive improvement over Vista, the key thing i love Windows 7 for was bringing x64 to the masses in the Windows world, Vista had a good stab at it and it was one of the positives with the platform.

Veteran

Som

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Apologies for the topic, but it was an area of interest for me. There weren't many Vista topics, so...

After using Vista on a newer machine, I didn't know what all the flak was about. The only issue I had was a missing driver after installation (of RTM), which is understandable since the computer was manufactured in late 2008.

Vista introduced so many nice features. In fact, Windows Vista is the only operating system to have six articles on the English version of Wikipedia dedicated to the new features it introduced!

What was your experience (assuming you had one) with the operating system? What was your initial impression after the first log in? What made you go "Wow!"?

problem with vista at the time was they under speced it. They said it could run on computers that weren't powerful enough and then it was just slow and painful to use for a lot of people. Personally i liked it though until 7 came out and then I truely realised how bad it was performance wise.

New things I liked .... Start menu and the GUI, Media Centre,

New things I didn't like ... UAC, Ultimate Extras (or lack thereof) , sidebar.... even now the OS it's still sluggish

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+Warwagon MVC

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problem with vista at the time was they under speced it. They said it could run on computers that weren't powerful enough and then it was just slow and painful to use for a lot of people. Personally i liked it though until 7 came out and then I truely realised how bad it was performance wise.

New things I liked .... Start menu and the GUI, Media Centre,

New things I didn't like ... UAC, Ultimate Extras (or lack thereof) , sidebar.... even now the OS it's still sluggish

This! Windows Vista Basic on a machine with only 512 Megs of ram was a crime against humanity! It was an abomination!

Veteran

~Johnny

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Using Vista now is generally fine, most of the issues at the time were that people were putting Vista on machines that really weren't beefy enough to handle it. That, and Intel / Microsoft decided to lower the minimum specs so cheap Intel machines could run it, which hurt it's image.

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contextfree

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Just like Win8, Vista is/was hated upon because the so called geeks and nerds are hostile to change, there was nothing wrong with Vista that the hardware vendors slowness in updating drivers could have fixed, otherwise it was a huge improvement over WinXP

I think it's mostly a matter of having enough benefits to offset the costs of adjusting to change - which are real costs, since some of the skills and muscle memory you'd built up before no longer works and you have to spend time relearning things. From an end user POV Vista had some nice new features (search, breadcrumb bar) but they just didn't provide enough benefit by themselves, however when Windows 7 added more nice new features the combined benefits of what was new in Vista + what was new in 7 were enough to take it over the top. I would agree that Win8 is in a somewhat similar situation especially since the new UI and app model requires relearning but there aren't yet enough useful apps or powerful features in the new UI / model to justify the relearning cost, hopefully 8.5 or 9 will change that not necessarily by "fixing" things from 8 (though some of that probably needs to happen too) but just by adding enough new useful stuff to make it worthwhile.

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redvamp128

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Personally Vista was one of those ones that people like to give a hard time to..... I never really had that much issues with it.

It was really bad before service pack 1 then got better after....

It also got better once you disabled the side-bar. (i don't know about you but the double clocks digital and analog were too much for me)

Once I installed ccleaner to help get rid of the extra restore points.

Defragment it is a must at least once a month for me.

It is still running on the Wife's Toshiba Laptop.

Enthusiast

Nathaniel Smith_329019

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I got Vista Business for free form a link off neowin. I had the beta on my HD DV2000 lol. It was slow but so was the laptop and I think the only problem I had was 64bit sound drivers for my laptop but that was on HP. I enjoyed the new media player and office 2007. Office was faster and the layout was easier to work with. Currently I am enjoying Windows 8 and a $10 copy of Office 2013 pro. This update reminds me of Vista with a drastic change in UI and perforemence wise reminds me of XP and Windows 7. My only gripes are the Charm bar and lack of a true desktop version. I know Windows blue should fix all my complaints though. Vista had its problems that Windows 7 fixed but it brought some nice changes to the desktop.

Rising Star

Driph

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I remember beta testing it, that side bar was so gnarly & shinny. That long horn was a sexy beast. Too bad it was damn near useless, & resource hog. Around that time i had built my first custom desktop, Athlon 3200 w/ dual ch. 512 pc3200, getting drivers was a tedious mission. Back then, there were long boot times, long shutdowns, random freezes. It was like a long crowded bus ride on a hot summers day that you had to board, but really you were 2nd guessing yourself the whole trip but still lying to yourself claiming "this is progress". Once windows 7 came out, it was far superior with the same hardware from earlier, i ran with it, and never looked back...

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mrp04

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I didn't have any issues. I had just built a brand new computer with a Core 2 Duo E6600 and 2GB RAM, which for the time was REALLY damn fast and a TON of RAM. It ran like a dream.

The people who had trouble with Vista were the ones using it on computers with 512MB-1GB RAM, which was (incorrectly!) within Microsoft's specifications. Microsoft just shouldn't have allowed it on computers with less than 1GB RAM and should have recommended 2GB. Unfortunately for most, 2GB RAM at that time was around $250.

Also NVIDIA didn't help with their ****ty drivers for the first few months. Display driver crashes happened a decent amount, but luckily they no longer brought down the system.

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Andre S. Veteran

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  • Veteran
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Well let's see, back in 2007 when this came out...

- NVIDIA drivers would BSOD the system all the time; when they got better and stopped causing BSODs they caused TDRs instead

- It was the slowest Windows to boot up and shut down ever. Yes Windows ME was faster.

- It wouldn't wake up from sleep. I had to disconnect the thing from the wall for hours for the CPU to forget it had been set to sleep. Admitedly perhaps that was a bug with Intel CPUs rather than Vista, but anyhow.

- Many many horror stories about failed updates. Luckily I didn't run into any, but I know several that did.

Still, I found it a revolutionary and exciting OS. It had

- A new driver model

- 64-bit was finally on par with 32-bit

- A new hardware accelerated desktop renderer (Aero)

- Completely revamped security model

- Completely rewritten network stack

- DirectX would stop resetting everytime you alt-tabbed out of a fullscreen game (because of WDDM driver model)

- You never needed to run defrag anymore

- And a lot more...

So it was a really ambitious release of Windows that got delayed because of the .NET rewrite failure, and of course had tons of driver issues because of new driver model + 64-bitness. Overall it was kind of a necessary evil so Windows 7 could be as problem-free at it was. It really pushed desktop computing forward.

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Brandon H Supervisor

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  • Supervisor
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there were 3 reasons Vista was disliked (plus 1 more reason if you bought OEM computer)

1. Had terrible driver support when it RTMed (that was the manufacturers fault not MS)

2. Vista memory management wasn't the greatest

3. UAC was in your face constantly for pretty much everything (this was fixed up heavily in the first 2 SP)

and the 4th reason which involves OEMs was they were notorious for putting Vista on computers that had no right to run it (aka the specs were way too low. single core CPUs, not much ram. etc.)

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Ian W

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  • Author
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That was perfectly the time that there should have been drivers for it, Vista was released in 2007, Win 7 was released in 2009

2008 was Vistas limelight year

Perhaps I should have been more clear. There were drivers for the device (NVIDIA nForce 10/100 Mbps Ethernet) online, but RTM wasn't compatible with it 'out of the box'. This was understandable.

Thanks to all of you for your answers!

Neowinian

Russell Green

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Yes it really was that bad.

1 .Driver support was god damn terrible. My whole time of using XP, Win7 and Win8 I've had 1 BSOD. With Vista is was a common occurrence every few days. Drivers were the main issue behind this.

2. Application compatibility, Windows has always been very good when it came to backward compatibility. Vista being the exception the rule.

3. The power your machine needed to run Vista was ridiculous. Microsoft should have never allowed machines to be sold with 512MB of RAM with Vista basic. For a good user experience you needed 2GB of RAM and a 2.0GHz dual-core processor. Which at the time was verging on absurd.

3. UAC was a stupid idea and implemented very poorly. It appeared so often nobody ever read the warnings and interrupted what you were doing for 5 seconds or so each time.

4. Windows update was bad enough to provoke suicide with it slowness and monotonous process of reboot after reboot to install some updates.

Most of all, it forced me to convert to Linux until the release of 7. 7 came and it was everything Vista should have been and I came running back.

Grand Master

Gerowen

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Things I hated about Vista.

Windows Media Player 11 was terrible. I loved WMP 10's interface, for me that was the pinnacle of WMP before I switched entirely to Linux. WMP 10 really was just a good media player that functioned well, played anything you installed a codec for, started up fast and was responsive, and had an easy to use interface. WMP 11 seemed much slower, and having to switch to different areas by clicking the tiny little arrow button that was on the bottom of the bigger buttons on top annoyed the crap out of me.

Updating was SLOOOOOOOWWWWW. On Debian Linux I can install 100 MB worth of updates and, if necessary, reboot and be back at my desktop ready to work in about 3 minutes. In Windows Vista, installing 100 MB of updates and doing a reboot has taken me upwards of a half an hour on the same hardware. 7 and XP are still pretty slow at installing updates compared to Linux, but from what I've seen at work and for a little while before switching entirely to Linux, they were both much faster at handling updates than Vista.

The whole system felt horribly slow. Switching back to "Classic" helped a little bit, at the cost of some aesthetics, but even on beefier hardware it just kind of felt "sluggish". Everything about the whole system from file transfers to opening your favorite internet browser, seemed to take a noticeably longer time on Windows Vista than on any other operating system.

UAC could have been done better. I know it was modeled after some *nix properties, like regular users not having permissions to system folders etc., but it seems like the Vista UAC was constantly popping up left and right, and it got to the point that it was pointless to use it because nobody read the process name that was trying to do something, everybody just clicked Continue as soon as they saw the dialog.

Driver changes broke a lot of things. Those of us who wanted to use Windows so we could play WoW, but hated Vista, found ourselves installing XP, only to find out that PC vendors that released a PC with Vista pre-installed, did not provide links to drivers for XP on their website.

A lot of older applications didn't like Vista. I tried playing Age of Empires 2 on my Vista box and for some reason the whole game would "run", but everything was speckled in red, and I had several older applications that wouldn't even execute, even when going into the file properties and setting it run in "Compatibility Mode", and setting compatibility mode to emulate Windows XP.

Weird default FTP settings made accessing my Linux server to transfer files ridiculously slow. I could use Filezilla and snag large files no problem at an acceptable rate, but when I tried mapping the drive to "My Computer" so I could just go and copy and paste files as I needed them, I noticed that the responsiveness and transfer rate was at least half of what I saw when using Filezilla.

There's more, but those are some of the big ones I thought of right off the top of my head.

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