Was Windows Vista THAT Bad?

[Mark Kaine]

25 minutes ago, SonOfFire said:

Vista wasn't that bad, but i wasn't good. i looked nice, but didn't run good.

I mean I know people didn't like it mostly for stability reasons but idk, I've used it over 10 years and I didn't have any issues to actually run something...played tons of NFS Carbon for example, not a single crash in thousands of hours... but I also had pretty complex music programs,  everything that was supposed to run on it did... even older games from XP era weren't an issue. 

 

It did very rarely "crash" but that was generally while idling or during "wake up"  which in hindsight was probably the processors fault,  AM3, not that different to AM4 apparently which,  in certain configurations,  also *really* likes to crash during idle lol...

 

Also definitely bug,  took me 2 years before I figured it out,  I had to reinstall windows roughly every 12 months,  otherwise the system became very, very,  incredibly s l o w 

 

I suppose 'memory leak' or whatever,  fact is reinstall fixed it every time (and people still do this on windows 10)

 

[flibberdipper]

49 minutes ago, SonOfFire said:

Vista wasn't that bad, but i wasn't good. i looked nice, but didn't run good.

It didn't run well if you were one of the megaminds trying to run it on a bottom-of-the-barrel Celeron with half a gig of RAM and onboard graphics. Even a halfway respectable P4 with 2GB of RAM and a budget friendly graphics card can make it run just fine.

[freeagent]

I liked Vista lol.. You needed good hardware for the full effect iirc. Looking back each OS was a stepping stone.

 

Pain was trying to run Longhorn on a Celery 500 with 256Mb ram

[Duo01]

I'm here to post my experience with vista - not too late apparently. 

I used vista in 2014-2018 and honestly - it isn't as bad as people make it out to be. It almost never crashed, it never gave me performance issues. 

(this is about what it looked like: https://poshmark.com/listing/Dell-Inspiron-530-Desktop-5d670221d400087a6ac1a0a7?l_con=PREOWNED%2FUSED&gclid=2cadfe8311d21482bac09e03506092ad&gclsrc=3p.ds&utm_source=bdm&campaign_id=373539630&utm_campaign=373539630&ad_partner=bing&msclkid=2cadfe8311d21482bac09e03506092ad) 

I was able to run games on the 4gb of ram (and a decent intel processor for the time) the system had and it even ran a Windows 10 VM pretty well. (for an old system)

 

It did what I needed it to do - mess around and play games on it. It ran all the way until I got a Windows 8 laptop in 2017. 

[TheLabCat]

On 11/17/2018 at 3:03 PM, CubityFirst said:

That intro was pretty good :^)
Vista however, It wasn't great.

Dude, the SEARCH ENGINE…!

[An0maly_76]

As someone who got Vista on a brand-new Sony Vaio from Best Buy in 2008, they were 0 for 3. Never bother with any of the three again.
Beavis and Butt-Head would have destroyed it, because uh, it like, sucks and stuff. Huh-huh... Huh-huh...

[JoshB2084]

I used to have Vista installed on my Compaq laptop, and it wasn't that bad. And I heavily modded Aero glass for fun like see-through the apps.(RIP GPU usage) What amazing things to look at are Windows Gadgets.

[Captainbeaky]

“Was Vista that bad?”.

Yes.

 

Yes it was.

 

Vista was the reason that I bought into Apple for home use.

Vista was so bad that the next version of Windows, (Win7) used less resources and ran quicker!

I was so fed up of horrible rubbish Vista in work that I just didn’t want that in my computing life at home. 

 

The fast boot and smooth running of the Mac was fabulous (in comparison to the resource hungry dumpster fire that was Vista). At the time ( back in 2011) , I bought my iMac through a work promotion, so all-in, it was comparable in price to a similarly specified Dell system.

 

But, times have changed, Apple do (imho) still offer some good value, good performance products - namely the Mac mini, IPad and IPhone SE, but these seem to stand alone, with everything else now so hideously expensive that it’s becoming less relevant, especially with Windows overall experience being immeasurably better that it was in the Vista days...

 

 

 

 

 

[An0maly_76]

25 minutes ago, Captainbeaky said:

“Was Vista that bad?”.

Yes.

 

Yes it was.

 

Vista was the reason that I bought into Apple for home use.

I really don't know whether this is comical or sad TBH... But the truth is often said in jest.

[Captainbeaky]

37 minutes ago, An0maly_76 said:

I really don't know whether this is comical or sad TBH... But the truth is often said in jest.

It was the damn truth.

I used to be a PC man, never bothered with Mac at all.

But also at the time, we had Vista in work, running aerospace data simulations and fault tree analysis. It was slow, crashy and spent ages updating ( seemingly every darn day), as well as the 3 to 5 minute boot time, and 3 monthly rebuild just because... 

 

When my mate bought a Mac Mini, and it booted in 10 seconds flat from cold I was blown away - for the first time ever, you could turn the computer off and back on without going to make a cup of tea while it booted. The Mac Mini wasn’t expensive either - same sort of price as a decent SFF Dell. 

 

From the the standpoint of a user who just wanted to check mail, surf, write some documents and manage photos, it was a huge improvement over Vista, and I still like using my 2011 27” iMac for the day to day stuff, while I have my PC for the fun or techie stuff. 

 

Putting it another way, its a bit like my car and my motorbike. The bike is for playing only - it’s a fiddly twitchy KTM that needs constant attention. The car is for going from A to B and it’s a dependable Toyota that I don’t need to even think about. For me, this is the difference between Mac and PC. If you just want to drive it and not fiddle with it - get the Mac, if you want to play, gaming etc, and are happy delving under the hood, get a PC. 

 

But at the time of Vista, the PC was the poorer performer too!

 

With the advent of Windows 7 and onward, things changed massively - and oh my we were so grateful when we updated to Win 7 in work. The run time for some simulations nearly halved!

 

I’ve got a foot in each camp. I use the iMac for everyday stuff, and the PC where I have to. But I’m rebuilding my PC and adding some serious Ryzen heft to the CPU’s to run Fusion360, so it will be interesting to see how I use them going forward. With Apple taking iMac prices into the stratosphere, the decision to go for another iMac is moot - what would I prefer, another cool motorbike, or just an iMac. But I will seriously consider the Mac Mini, we will see...

 

 

[An0maly_76]

I get what you're saying. However, as long as I can remember, pickings were slim for Apple when it came to software. Maybe that's changed, but Apple seems more or less pigeon-holed into specific purpose-designed apps because Apple wants such an iron grip on anything made to run on them. At least that's been my experience.