I have been experimenting with Windows Vista...and it's quite good!

[Vishera]

In the past i bought a copy of Vista the moment it was released,I really wanted something new and fresh over the old design of Windows XP,my experience was OK,

I didn't have problems since my hardware was fully supported and more than enough to run it.

 

Now i wanted to experiment with Vista,and found out that it's really fun!

People on the internet managed to modify the Kernel of Vista and add features like DX11 and a DX11 to DX12 translation layer,and other cool stuff.

 

Windows Vista is better than i thought,perhaps because of the updates it received during it's life time.

 

Now days Windows Vista feels really good,it's a polished product,very stable and does what you want it to do.

 

You can definitely feel that Windows 7 and Vista are very similar,

Is Windows 7 better? - Yes,but Vista is still a very good OS.

 

Screenshots:

 

[Moonzy]

maybe it's fine when u can throw ton of processing horsepower and RAM at it

 

try using a suitable era mid-range PC and you might come to different conclusions

[tikker]

I never had much to complain about with Vista to be honest and that was on a laptop of that era even. It may have been a tad on the heavy side, but it wasn't anywhere near as unusable as the internet sometimes likes to proclaim in my opinion.

[Vishera]

9 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

maybe it's fine when u can throw ton of processing horsepower and RAM at it

 

try using a suitable era mid-range PC and you might come to different conclusions

I already did that in 2006,

I had a dual core Pentium CPU and 2GB of RAM.

I remember that my experience back then was OK.

4 minutes ago, tikker said:

I never had much to complain about with Vista to be honest and that was on a laptop of that era even. It may have been a tad on the heavy side, but it wasn't anywhere near as unusable as the internet sometimes likes to proclaim in my opinion.

There were many users with single core processors back then that struggled to run the OS.

I compared Vista and 7,and Vista in fact is heavier than Windows 7,especially when it comes to RAM.

[Moonzy]

2 minutes ago, Vishera said:

I remember that my experience back then was OK.

i had experienced with it briefly with a core 2 duo 2gb laptop

i remembered that yea it's fine, but definitely not as great as win 7 in term of system resources or overall responsiveness iirc

[8tg]

I daily used a vista 32 bit ultimate installation on an era machine, a Thinkpad Z61t with a core duo t2400 and 3gb of ram all the way into late 2019 as my only computer.

I never had any issues with it, vista was a pretty decent OS, it’s bad reputation comes from being very poorly optimized on launch and OEMs slapping it on mid XP era hardware and the customer finding it ran like crap. Vista was fine if you had a core2duo and 3 or 4gb of ram, but a lot of people were running it on things like socket 478 celeron D’s and Pentium 4’s to discover that it was nearly unusable. It was very much so ahead of the capabilities of hardware of its time.

 

[jaslion]

19 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

maybe it's fine when u can throw ton of processing horsepower and RAM at it

 

try using a suitable era mid-range PC and you might come to different conclusions

Vista was fine on a athlon 64 x2 (hell even the athlon 64 3000+ ran it quite well) with 2gb of ram. Yes this was upper mid range back then but still it did work fine if you got a mid range system a year after launch of vista.

 

7 was basically vista optimized and whatnot so vista had no place to exist anymore when that launched. Vista was basically the needed stepping stone for people to get off their pentium 2 machines running xp so to say.

[Vishera]

2 minutes ago, 8tg said:

I daily used a vista 32 bit ultimate installation on an era machine, a Thinkpad Z61t with a core duo t2400 and 3gb of ram all the way into late 2019 as my only computer.

 

Those Thinkpads are great

[BondiBlue]

28 minutes ago, tikker said:

I never had much to complain about with Vista to be honest and that was on a laptop of that era even. It may have been a tad on the heavy side, but it wasn't anywhere near as unusable as the internet sometimes likes to proclaim in my opinion.

Exactly. I was running it on a Pentium 4 laptop from 2002. It only had 512MB of RAM, and the 30GB hard drive was failing. It still ran fine. 

[tikker]

1 hour ago, Vishera said:

I already did that in 2006,

I had a dual core Pentium CPU and 2GB of RAM.

I remember that my experience back then was OK.

There were many users with single core processors back then that struggled to run the OS.

I compared Vista and 7,and Vista in fact is heavier than Windows 7,especially when it comes to RAM.

Ah yeah I did have the luxury of a dual core processor. Not denying it was heavy or anything, I had my share of seeing it struggle at times, but overall it was a good experience.

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Windows

[Seyrren]

12 hours ago, Vishera said:

In the past i bought a copy of Vista the moment it was released,I really wanted something new and fresh over the old design of Windows XP,my experience was OK,

I didn't have problems since my hardware was fully supported and more than enough to run it.

 

Now i wanted to experiment with Vista,and found out that it's really fun!

People on the internet managed to modify the Kernel of Vista and add features like DX11 and a DX11 to DX12 translation layer,and other cool stuff.

 

Windows Vista is better than i thought,perhaps because of the updates it received during it's life time.

 

Now days Windows Vista feels really good,it's a polished product,very stable and does what you want it to do.

 

You can definitely feel that Windows 7 and Vista are very similar,

Is Windows 7 better? - Yes,but Vista is still a very good OS.

 

Screenshots:

 

Did you use it on your sig pc ? what drivers did you use ? This sounds awesome!

[Vishera]

13 hours ago, Seyrren said:

Did you use it on your sig pc ?

No,I didn't.

I use a FX 8320E + SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6750 1GB GDDR5 + Kingston D3N9 1333MHz CL9 4GB x2

13 hours ago, Seyrren said:

what drivers did you use ?

Catalyst 13.4 and the motherboard drivers from the webpage of the motherboard,

With this setup i can even run Windows XP if i want - It's fully supported on this setup.

[Vishera]

Here are the amazing things a modded Kernel can do:

Firefox doesn't work on vanilla Vista,but with kernel mods it sure can!:

 

Vanilla Vista doesn't have DX11? - Kernel mods to the rescue:

[Seyrren]

24 minutes ago, Vishera said:

No,I didn't.

I use a FX 8350 + SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6750 1GB GDDR5 + Kingston D3N9 1333MHz CL9 4GB x2

Catalyst 13.4 and the motherboard drivers from the webpage of the motherboard,

With this setup i can even run Windows XP if i want - It's fully supported on this setup.

Oh, i hoped windows 7 drivers might work or something because of the changes to the kernel... Vista and windows 2000 are my favorite OS's, i'm gonna get hated for this but i don't really care, most people dissing Vista have no freaking idea what they are talking about. Vista only had one problem, and it was with laptops, the way it was design it just wasn't power efficient and it showed. The other things ? High system requirements, instability are things that just ignorant people either had mistaken about (as in they had no idea how something worked) or blame it on the OS rather then drivers. Even windows 2000 (which was probably the most rock solid stable OS MS ever made) can be an unstable mess without proper drivers, and it was the same for vista, we can thank many of the hardware manufacturers that did such a poor job for the draconic driver signature that started appearing with windows 7, that's what caused most of the instabilities. As for high requirements.... they aren't really any different then 7, windows vista was designed to take advantage of ram and other resources properly keeping various libraries loaded so that it could quickly respond to the most frequent demands of the user, the moment though you would launch something ram intensive it would flush all that out and concentrate on that app or game, everything launched and worked really well on that OS and i never felt i had any issues or that my experience was subpar when compared to XP even when i was using under 1GB of ram gaming with it. This doesn't work very well with laptops as the constant use of ram can drain battery life, but its great with Desktop PC's where it can make things snappier. Its also IMHO the best looking windows ever. I do also have an older FX4300 pc i could try this on, but i honestly wanted to do it on my main system.

[Vishera]

1 minute ago, Seyrren said:

Oh, i hoped windows 7 drivers might work or something because of the changes to the kernel...

It's coming,there are kernel mods in development to allow installation of Windows 7 drivers.

2 minutes ago, Seyrren said:

Vista and windows 2000 are my favorite OS's

I skipped Windows 2000,went from Windows 98 to XP.

With Vista i had an OK experience back then,

But only now i realize how good it is,though it's significantly less responsive than Windows 7,

It's quite heavy on resources,even for modern day hardware.

5 minutes ago, Seyrren said:

i'm gonna get hated for this but i don't really care, most people dissing Vista have no freaking idea what they are talking about.

No hate,Vista is a good OS.

8 minutes ago, Seyrren said:

Its also IMHO the best looking windows ever.

I was surprised how good Vista looks,I think that 7 and Vista are the best looking - The problem is that i can't choose a first place

10 minutes ago, Seyrren said:

I do also have an older FX4300 pc i could try this on, but i honestly wanted to do it on my main system.

Yeah,Vista still has the driver problem,it never went away.

[Vishera]

More DX11 games on Vista:

 

@Seyrren I mentioned you just in case you would like to see that

[Seyrren]

6 hours ago, Vishera said:

But only now i realize how good it is,though it's significantly less responsive than Windows 7,

I'm not 100% sure if i remember this right, since it was a long time ago since i used it, but rather then being unresponsive i think the problem was that it was to heavy on effects, vaguely i remember something along those lines, try removing some of the transition in the effects tab and it should be better.

 

6 hours ago, Vishera said:

It's coming,there are kernel mods in development to allow installation of Windows 7 drivers.

Wow that's some really good news, though it remains to be seen how stable it will be. Is there a community forum or hub or news for this ? If possible can you share it ? I want to keep up to date.

6 hours ago, Vishera said:

I skipped Windows 2000,went from Windows 98 to XP.

 

You missed one hell of an OS :P. 2000 wasn't quite as snappy as XP and 98 but it was a rock solid experience, how it handled when installed its pretty much how it performed through all the years i used it, even though it got some severe punishment from me at the time not properly taking care of it and being filled with crap, in RPG terms windows 2000 would be the Tanker of the MS OS's. To be honest i only moved to XP because of the lack of drivers once that my hardware was to new for it to support 2000 any longer.

 

Can i make a screenshot request ? Can you please post a screenshot with Windows Vista and the taskbar set to the left side as thin as possible ?

[Vishera]

9 minutes ago, Seyrren said:

I'm not 100% sure if i remember this right, since it was a long time ago since i used it, but rather then being unresponsive i think the problem was that it was to heavy on effects, vaguely i remember something along those lines, try removing some of the transition in the effects tab and it should be better.

Yep,I already did that and it helped,

But it still not as snappy as Windows 7.

11 minutes ago, Seyrren said:

Wow that's some really good news, though it remains to be seen how stable it will be. Is there a community forum or hub or news for this ? If possible can you share it ? I want to keep up to date.

Yes: https://msfn.org/board/topic/181612-wip-windows-vista-extended-kernel/

And: https://forum.eclipse.cx/viewforum.php?f=10

[Vishera]

19 minutes ago, Seyrren said:

Can i make a screenshot request ? Can you please post a screenshot with Windows Vista and the taskbar set to the left side as thin as possible ?

Sure,there you go:

 

[Seyrren]

5 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Sure,there you go:

 

I hoped it might be thinner then 7 and others but oh well, thank you very much for the screen and sparing me the time of testing it in a VM XD.