why was vista bad?

[zerouplol12]

ive never had a vista machine so could anybody tell me what was so bad about it

[_ASSASSIN_]

unreliable, not stable

[AbidingDude]

every windows OS is either a hit or miss,

XP was great, vista shit, Win 7 was great, Win 8 is pretty crap

[Bonsai99]

It ran like crap, still does, Most OEM's put Vista onto older hardware that barely barely met the minimum requirements to start with

^ This, my grandpa had vista on a pentium 4 computer and it ran like shit.

[ttam]

Vista was demanding on machines. Small comparability issues. Lack of drivers for certain things. It wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. A lot of people disliked Vista because they were told to dislike Vista and can't get their own opinions.

[Unhelpful]

Essentially Vista was the alpha for windows 7. Released as a full OS.

[Lil Chillbil]

vista was the os for gaming pc's and oem's put them on celerons that couldn't run it smooth 

[EChondo]

Can't wait for GoodBytes to post.

 

Vista was bad at first because of bugs and glitches, also it was unstable for some because of the new GUI.

 

Vista with SP2 was amazing however. 

[Imaginaerum]

I had Vista since launch on a dual-core computer and had no problems, I never understood the hate. All my games ran fine, I had zero compatibility issues, and I honestly couldn't tell a difference from XP minus less blue screens before SP3.

[Benjio]

I never really understood why people hated it so much, I work with a lot of computers and I have just as many issues and bugs with XP and 7. I would rather have Vista over XP any day, its basically just a slightly worse version of 7.

[WorldDominator]

My father still runs it...it's awful lol

[Stephie_Girl]

every windows OS is either a hit or miss,

XP was great, vista shit, Win 7 was great, Win 8 is pretty crap

While it has been true

 

95 was good

98 sucked

2000 was good

ME sucked (nonexistent tho)

XP was good

Vista sucked

7 was good

8 is better but a terrible UI

 

Problem with vista was, it was windows 7 but incomplete.  It used a ton of resources (1.5GB ram page file), had a ton of stability issues and just sucked.  2 years later they fixed it and re-released it and called it windows 7.

[upliftsleet1974]

unreliable, not stable

^^^ this and it is just bad!!

[Charger]

anything is better then me even vista wasn't that bad. I never really had many problems with it i think because i never let anything run it for long lol

[Hirad123]

vista felt to me like an unfinished windows 7 that nothing could run well.

[Guest]

The name.

 

V is in the world 'evil'

I stood for 'I' as in 'no teamwork'

S stood for 'sore', as in 'sore muscles'

T stood for 'terrible' as in ' that OS is terrible!'

A stood for 'aliens' which is proof that aliens did land on earth somewhere.

 

 

 

Actually I don't know but we can conclude Aliens landed here from 'Vista'. Evil aliens who work alone and worked out a lot, made extra angry because they had to use a slow and terrible operating system.

 

 

But no really, I don't know, I never used it, skipped from XP to W7.

[brownninja97]

The thing was as slow as hell, maybe my 2gb ram at the time didnt help 

[IdeaStormer]

Are you sure you want to know? Yes, No

 

Are you really sure you want to know? Yes, No

 

Are you really, really sure you want to know? Yes, No

 

Are you really, really....   

 

Need I go on

[Nicolas]

I actually like vista and still run it on my laptop

[atrash]

i once has Vista on my C2D laptop with 2GB of RAM, for almost 5 years before moving to W7. Got it on the launching day. It definitely crashes a lot, and a resource hog. I had the experience of talking on the phone with one of the Microsoft technicians for a WHOLE DAY, just to fix the god damn Windows Update. He was super helpful but in the end he gaved up and asked me to either ignore the updates or reformat my laptop.

[Ookami]

Original Vista was crap due to slowing down with time. After SP2 have been released it changed and became normal OS. I have been working on Vista for few years even after 7 release and it comes from my own experience as after SP2 i havent had any problems with it. Modding the OS installation gives even bigger improvement.

[linusforsell]

"Many" people moved from XP to Vista, not knowing that it would be much more demanding on their not-strong-enough PCs, and that at launch (and even through the first year) there were problems with a lot drivers. This lead to a (still) never ending circling spiral of bad reviews and negative virality of how bad the operating system was. I experienced it through the "bad times" and when SP2 landed, it suddenly became a great, usable and stable OS. Which soon was replaced by the great-from-start Windows 7, which at first was fairly similar to Vista SP2 in terms of reliability.

[Fetzie]

A lot of Vista's problems was that it came pre-installed on systems that had no business running the OS. It was installed on Pentium 4 computers with 512MB or 1GB RAM; computers that would have struggled with XP, let alone the Aero desktop theme. And of course people blamed the OS for being slow, instead of the crap hardware that the OEM distributor decided they would put in the system. And it kind of snowballed.

 

It didn't help that the OS wasn't particularly stable until a couple of service packs had been released, after SP2 Vista became as stable as Windows 7.

[GoodBytes]

Ok they are a lot of miss information here.

Vista is an interesting OS.

 

In itself, Vista was pretty good. Not Win7 good, but better than XP (which people got used to the issues because they used it for ~6 years).

The problem is that Vista was too ahead of its time. Basically, if you wanted to run Vista smoothly, at it's release, you needed a gaming PC. And not just any gaming PC, oh no. It needed to be specifically built to make sure it had the latest technologies. This meant that computers in stores, would cost a lot of money. and I mean a lot... 2000$+ easy.

 

Here is what Windows Vista needed:

 -> A TRUE dual core CPU, that is also 64-bit

 -> 2GB of RAM 400MHz of faster

 -> GPU with 256MB of memory (so a gaming GPU of the time. Not a pro gaming one, but still.. considering that people used Intel intergrated graphics, where Intel latest model at the time, pretty much promising perfectly smooth DVD playback..., and "smooth" HD video playback...yea.. sad days)

 -> 32-bit Pixel Shader 2.0 support (again, gaming GPU).

 -> While not mentioned in the specs, Vista dropped a lot of legacy technology support, in favor, of newer and significantly better technologies. Microsoft had to do this, no choice. In a blog post Microsoft said that in order to support Vista new security features, and well new technologies, there was no choice in dropping legacy technologies. This also meant, that you needed a SATA HDD, with NCQ supported HDD, and your SATA controller set to AHCI mode (funny fact. I recall people actually searching for a NCQ compatible HDD, but they all forgot to switch the SATA controller to AHCI, heck even today, people forget... well now with UEFI BIOS's setup, its not an issue, as motherboard manufactures had 2005 ring for them, and FINALLY realized to set AHCI mode turned on by default).

 

All of the above contributed in making an actual Vista ready system, expensive. So what OEMs did, instead of going "Well that's the price, that's the price, sadly" (which is stupid, as their margins would have been better), went it installed it on non Vista compatible, pushing Microsoft to lower the minimum specs (Microsoft mistake, but understandable), just to get the Vista ready sticker. Well, lowering number on a product sheet, doesn't magically make the OS ran better, but rather worse. Also, OEMs were too busy emptying they stock, with non-Vista compatible technologies, and Intel integrated graphics, to continue to push low cost systems.

 

Vista was installed on systems that were a joke at the time, even for XP. Old P4's, 512MB of RAM at best, and all that, or Intel """"dual"""" core CPU, the Pentium D.. which was nothing more than 2x P4's somehow stuck together, not really working together, but somehow works. A probably Intel rushed product to compete with AMD Athlon 64 X2 series, which was loved by gamers, due to the sheer massacre in performance of Intel best offering of the time... and that was only the mid range model. It wasn't funny for Intel. It's like if we go back in time, with the Radeon 5000 days, and Nvidia releases today's GeForce Titan back then. Ouch! (ok not that extreme, but still. Enough to justify the 750$ (Canadian) price tag for the mid range model).

 

But, it's not all OEMs fault.

Another fault was Microsoft. Microsoft did multiple mistakes with Vista:

 -> It was develop by people with high excitement about building a kick-ass OS, what I mean is that, assume we knew how to build an OS, and we get together with plenty of excitement, passion, and dedication (and paid), and build an OS, for us, assuming our high-end gaming rigs. We blast it with awesome ideas, and cool concepts, in exchange of requiring high performance, ignoring the fact that not everyone has a computer like ours. Miss management, perhaps... Microsoft has extremely talented people, always had, like Google, they only hire the best of the best, managers role, is to put limits, else nothing will be released, as things can always be improved, new features can always be added, and code can always be more optimized. It's like putting a kid in a Lego factory, with lots of coffee, and tell him to design a new product. 20 years later, I bet you he or she will still be at it, with numerous prototypes built. So it is hard for managers to put limits... you always going to displease people, and it's hard to put limits.. where do you put them? What do you cut in favors of others? While a manager could be a previously developer, and not a clueless manager, his skills and knowledge are a bit rusty, as he does managerial stuff, instead of coding, conceptualizing, and so on, during his or her days. It's not an easy job, I am sure.

 

 -> Lack of communication between teams. There was a lack of communication between teams which made a lot of elements in teh OS inconsistent with one of each other. The worst of all, was the GUI of each application. The different looks that Windows Vista had between it's own bult-in programs and panel, really made is hard to use, and uninviting, as it looked unpolished, and a bit amateurish to some extent. While this was NOT the key element of why Vista failed, it didn't help. That is why in Windows 7, Windows 7 was the most consistent OS, since Windows 95, pretty crazy, if you ask me.

 

 -> Now there is no facts on this, just rumors, while it could be wrong, it does make sense. Microsoft released to manufactures "RTM" or "RC" built of Vista, numerous times during it's development (possibly since 2003), for driver development. This made hardware manufactures, be annoyed to develop drivers for the OS, and have Microsoft scrap the driver architecture (or modify it enough to cause issues), again and again. It manufactures go "You know what? We will wait for it to actually be released!". And this created a mess of release. Drivers were released somewhat in time, but super rushed, based on old drivers they last touch, meaning that it causes system stability issues, and worst: pretty much 0 optimizations. This made games runs much slower, which made us, computer enthusiasts/gamer, believe that the OS was very poorly optimized. Of course, it got quickly fixed (well if you had the latest hardware, else, you had to wait for the manufacture to go to your model generation), but the damage was done.

 

 -> Finally, another big factors, are peripheral manufactures. Oh ho ho, we have a story here. Manufactures pretty much all went "Hey! We need now to make entirely new drivers for this Vista thing. That cost money, especially trying to support our old printers, and stuff, while we can do it, like previous Windows, let's force the consumer to buy our new products. How do we make new products? Simple! We re-release the same products with a different looks. All we will need to do is change the plastic molding at the manufacturing stage, or color of the plastic, and not actually invest in R&D. BRILLIANT! We will be rich!". And that is what happened, HP being the most guilty party, but a lot of them were as well. People like us, would knew, if we spent a few minutes, that the "new" Vista ready, printers, scanners, webcam, etc.. uses the exact same processor as the previous model, that the specs are literately identical... and we would just go on the web site, download the new peripheral product drivers, and force install it in our system via device manager, and voila, the "non-Vista ready" peripheral, would now magically work!

 

But the normal consumers, don't know this, so they are annoyed that Vista didn't work with their new peripherals. And As the most people just web surf, watches video and use Office, much like today, going to Vista was not a necessary for their needs. So they went back to XP, or simply didn't upgrade.

 

 -> Microsoft lack of documentation at released. Vista was a bit rushed released, where the doc team didn't write documentation for IT's and developers at release. This made businesses have trouble identifying where things moved, or new ways to do things, which made many believe that Vista had lost a lot of needed business functionalists, and was no longer even considered for deployment (honestly with the specs that OS needed, I doubt it would have changed anything, as it would mean new fancy systems for the entire company, but still, didn't help)

 

 -> Lastly, Vista was more about a fresh start at it's core level. XP security was completely inadequate for when it was released back in 2001. Microosft knew this, and the only reason why we even had XP, was because MacOS X was released with it's new nice look... as this was MacOS 9.

 

Because, everything was focused on the core and background things of an OS, there wasn't must end user features, so many found no point in upgrading.. even thought, they technically speaking have. This is because the role of the OS is to hide a huge amount of what is happening on the back from the user. OSs got so much better, people think, even people on this very same forum, that the OS is more of a skin, even thought the looks of an OS is like what? 10% of an OS?

 

So in conclusion, the big factors of why Vista failed, or wasn't liked, was that the OS was too ahead of it's time, OEMs releasing it on non-actual Vista ready system, Microsoft being too nice with OEMs (something that Microsoft quickly learned... OEMs don't care about Microsoft, they care about short term sales numbers and profit, to please investors, especially lately, where they don't even care about the consumer anymore). Also, peripheral manufacture who decided to take advantage of it's consumers ignorance, the good news is that the manufacture that did these things, lost a lot of consumers, that is why they changed back towards the end of Vista life, and don't do this anymore. And lastly, lack of documentation at release.

 

Vista was one of a messy development and a very messy release. A good OS, overshadowed by the above issues. Hence, why Ballmer said how Vista development was indeed a mess, and biggest personal disappointment.

[nokturrduk84]

Vista wasn't bad at all. I remember when I was working in a company with like 20 users and they had XP on their machines. We had to reinstall them on every week or 2 cause XP was very non-secure and vulnerable to viruses, then when Vista came out and we installed it on machines, viruses problems almost disappeared. Only 1 minus of Vista was - it was too demanding. But again, it was HUGE STEP from XP, which was really sucky OS. You needed to reinstall your XP every month.