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The crazy thing was Vista was great with good hardware. The huge problem it had was strong security. Everything was locked down and required admin elevation to change.
You know how Linux requires su for every system change and everyone thinks that's fine? That was Vista but it enraged techies to click an ok box for su.
Iirc, tasks requiring elevated permissions wasn't the main complaint, maybe just one of the most vocal ones.
Even with good hardware, it was not optimized for performance in general. This was amplified by the fact they also marketed Vista as having a wide range of older hardware support, which resulted in many users upgrading from XP only to have their performance absolutely tank. I think there was even a lawsuit because of how they marketed some devices as, "Vista ready."
Regardless, Vista was still better than Windows 8.
I wasn't very old then but the main thing was RAM. Fuckers in Microsoft sales/marketing made 1 GB the minimum requirement for OEMs to install Vista.
So guess what? Every OEM installed Vista with 1 GB of RAM and a 5200 RPM hard drive (the "standard" config for XP which is what most of those SKUs were meant to target). That hard drive would inevitably spend its short life thrashing because if you opened IE it would immediately start swapping. Even worse with OEM bloat, but even a clean Vista install would swap real bad under light web browsing.
It was utterly unusable. Like, everything would be unbearably slow and all you could do was (slowly) open task manager and say "yep, literally nothing running, all nonessential programs killed, only got two tabs open, still swapping like it's the sex party of the century".
"Fixing" those hellspawns by adding a spare DDR2 stick is a big part of how I learned to fix computer hardware. All ya had to do was chuck 30 € of RAM in there and suddenly Vista went from actually unusable to buttery smooth.
By the time the OEMs wised up to Microsoft's bullshit, Seven was around the corner so everyone thought Seven "fixed" the performance issues. It didn't, it's just that 2 GB of RAM had become the bare minimum standard by then.
EDIT: Just installed a Vista VM because I ain't got nothing better to do at 2 am apparently. Not connected to the internet, didn't install a thing, got all of 12 processes listed by task manager, and it already uses 500 MB of RAM. Aero didn't even enable as I didn't configure graphics acceleration.
Can confirm 100%.
During Vista's heyday, I worked in a PC repair shop. All the ones that came in because "Vista sucks" were all Walmart specials with the bare minimum 512 MB RAM and crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel Seagate HDDs.
The thing would start thrashing as soon it booted with the default assortment of bloatware. By the time they brought it in, the HDD was in rough shape which made the thrashing even worse.
Fix was always to upgrade the RAM and, most often, replace the dying Seagate drive with a good one. Removing the bloatware helped as well once the root problems were addressed.
The UAC stuff was also annoying, but those could be tuned.
Yep, I did similar around the time. Can't blame people for being mad that the thing they bought is damn near unusable (and was destined to be, but they didn't understand that part). If someone buys a new bike, even if it's cheap, it shouldn't roll like you're on gravel after a couple weeks and become impossible to pedal within months. But damn, there were a lot of horrible machines sold in those days.
And then of course, the least fun part of that era, the guys who would bring their machines back weekly despite very stern warnings to stop visiting "those sites".
And then of course, the least fun part of that era, the guys who would bring their machines back weekly despite very stern warnings to stop visiting "those sites".
Hey, they were good for business lol
Definitely not wrong! Especially once you've dialed in your routine of anti-malware utilities to run on pretty much everything. It's like an antibiotic cocktail, lol. Or did you prefer the "back up and nuke on sight" approach?
I'd usually start with my suite of cleanup tools, do some manual cleanup if needed, apply all the software and security updates, and then give it a day with some light test usage. Then I'd re-run the tools to see if they picked anything back up. If not, I released it back to the customer. If anything at all came back, I'd backup their data, pull all the product keys I could (Office, Photoshop, etc), nuke the OS, and reinstall what I could as close to the original as possible.
this! i got my first vista experience on a laptop with a Turion and 2GB of RAM and it was really smooth. bit too chunky for my taste ux-wise but it was solid. first bluescreen i got on that machine was after installing W7.
then the GPU melted its own solder after a few years and that machine was relegated to server duty.
I remember defending it online against a bunch of Linux users and I got told that the UAC prompt is overbearing while having to type your password is fine because it’s just “muscle memory”.
Every technology that gets used frequently enough facilitates maladaptation to its faults. 😑
It enraged casual home users, not techies.
I think it enraged everyone, but when you’re already using a more secure system (Linux), the whiplash isn’t so surprising. Speaking as a non-Windows user, so just my outside observation.
The main issue was that Vista asked for admin rights all the time. One of the first things they addressed with SP1 was to require admin privileges for fewer operations, cutting down on the number of UAC prompts.
Yeah no, Windows 11 IS far worse than (current) Windows 10
I've been using Windows 11 for some time. Besides it's terrible AI features being shoved down our throats, what's different about it from Win10?
I don't see too much of a difference between the two versions. The AI enshittification is relatively recent.
For me it's the removal and change of UI elements. There is still no built in way to move the task bar to the top or side of the screen and to get a useful right click menu back I have to go into the registry and change a value. There is also the whole thing where you are forced to use a Microsoft account with no option to use a local account instead.
I guess the location of the menu never really bothered me but I can understand that for folks who prefer it on the side.
Admittedly, using a local account is a challenge though not impossible. But to your point none of these things should require registry hacks.
Besides the ones that they listed, I've also heard complaints about a lack of multi-monitor support and ads in the Start menu and login screen, though I believe the ads are only in certain versions of 11 (the home/personal editions, but not the more expensive company editions). I think the ads have also been limited to Microsoft products and apps from the Microsoft store - stuff like Word and Edge - but it's a really bad path that they're going down and it's only a matter of time until that becomes targeted ads to go along with their tracking and selling data.
Not defending windows 11 in any way, but on install, when you get to the "login to your microsoft account" screen, if you open command prompt (ctrl + f10 i think) and open the network utility - type ncpa.cpl, then you can find and disable your network adaptor. Close cmd and the network utility and click back. It will ask you to create a local user.
I've done this a couple of times and it hasn't forced me to create a Microsoft account yet (I use a lot of windows vms). If this no longer works on win11, apologies, it used to.
This may not still be true, but previously if you disconnected or removed the NIC during installation, after some haranguing you could setup a local account. (Note that this is still obviously bad, but if you need a solution, it might provide one.)
You actually have to exit the setup menu(f2 iirc), run a specific command, and then it will let you make an offline account.
If you don't have a NIC, it will make you get an internet connection before proceeding. That was my experience on my laptop. What had happened was that for whatever reason, my wifi card wouldn't work with the amd motherboard in my laptop (it wasn't cnvio, and it was the same issue with ac 7265 and an ax210). So I had to resort to that to install windows.
That's pretty much the main thing, through they keep trying to slip shit it like the recall function, ads in new places. They also had some real trouble with the new internal CPU management, not sure where that is these days.
Honestly I'm tired of Microsoft pulling this shit. Personally I can take a bad OS launch or needing a little more maintaince on my PC, but I don't want to fight them anymore for control of my own hardware.
Windows 11 is little more than a reskin of windows 10, and they still fucked it up.
Rounded corners are mandatory (Why? I really preferred squared ones). But developers can choose to have their windows square. Why only the developers? Let the user decide how a windows looks like!
And don't get me started on the start menu. It was a complete massacre. Tiles are gone (am I the only one that liked them?). Instead, now we pin apps to the start menu. Fine I guess, except for the fact that half of the fucking menu is taken up by fucking recomendations. If I remove every single recommendation, instead of having my space back for more pinned programs I get this message: "oh you like this precious white space? If you turned on some recommendations it would show something". No, i don't want recommendations, I want my start menu space back. Which btw in windows 10 used to be resizable to whatever size I wanted.
Oh and lets not forget about the volume mixer. Which some genius decided that it was better to keep it 10 clicks away from the user in the settings, instead of conveniently at one click in the taskbar. Which they also made the sound settings their own special taskbar element, instead of another taskbar program. So now if I want to replace their shitty sound settings with the ones I like (trumpet btw), now I would have 2 sound settings in the taskbar, while in win10 I only had 1.
And whose Idea was to join the sound settings and internet settings in the same taskbar button visually? Which is also not the same button functionally. You see, if you press the left side of the button it opens the sound settings, but the right side opens the internet settings. How much do Microsoft UI people get paid?
I guess we got dark notepad, that's nice.
oh God the volume mixer!
Privacy, I wager.
taskbar sucks balls
I have to use it for software testing and I fucking hate the UI with everything crammed into the center of the taskbar. Beyond that it's running in a virtual desktop and I don't go beyond launching apps in it so I really can't say. My work laptop is supposed to be upgraded next week, im sure ill find plenty to bitch about then.
Unpopular opinion that I have no justification for: I don't mind windows 11 all that much
Windows 11 is ok, just like windows 10 was ok. It's not great, but it's not satan's asshole like some people make it out to be. Most use it because they don't really have a choice due to software constraints, or simply because they've been using windows for forever and that's all they know.
Personally I use linux because I like it more, though I still have a windows install for flightsimming. I think that it's a perfectly fine operating system for the 80-90% of people who don't care and just want their computer to be an appliance to get on social media or get work done.
That's fair, I just like windows and that's really all there is to it. I've had a few Linux installs in the past, but never really found an advantage to anything except compiling this one specific python library, but these days I can do that very easily running WSL, VS code SSH'd to my server or more recently a jupyter server that I can connect to from any device with a web browser.
Now macOS on the other hand, I absolutely despise. It was one of the first OS's I learnt to use back in primary school, and now that I have to use it for work I have absolutely no nice things to say. Unintuitive, missing basic features and slow to navigate, and I can assure you that none of this is due to unfamiliarity...
I can't tell you how many times I've had to uninstall OneDrive & Teams from my work computer thanks to a Windows update reinstalling them. My IT director is getting frustrated by it too because he has to keep updating GP and other tools to prevent them from showing up and users inadvertently putting shit into the MS Cloud accidentally because OneDrive likes to insert itself the default documents folder.
I also prefer my start bar to be on the left hand side of my left-most monitor in vertical orientation (I run a tri-montior setup in a tie fighter configuration).
As already stated, the new right-click menu is also ass, and I keep having to fix it to get the actual fucking options I want/need without having to click a button to "show more options" from a menu that loads noticeably slower, or shift-right-click to get the intended menu.
There's a ton of other little annoyances, like removing or relocating configuration flows with inferior tools that don't support everything that used to be configurable. AI search in my start bar (so glad for PowerToys Run).
Windows 11 has done a great job at removing user control over their OS by forcing changes (often inferior to the old version/way) and forcing optional software installs (just wait til Recall is sitting on everybody's machine).
Things that are nice: A better networking stack, blue tooth management, and a powerful built-in windows layout manager (Snap Layouts)
Boiled frog
I think it's a boiling frog/straw on the camel's back situation.
I've heard people say both that Microsoft releases a good version of Windows every third time, and that the way Windows works is that Microsoft releases the new one, it's slightly worse/different from the previous and everybody hates it, then they get used to it by the time Microsoft releases the next version, starting the cycle of outrage all over again.
To me, it seems that the average user experience changes a little between different Windows versions, oftentimes making the experience a little more clumsy (have they finished migrating everything from the Control Panel to whatever the new settings panel is called yet? They started that back in like Windows 7), and the "power users" are the ones who get shafted worse.
For me, 10 will most likely be the last version of Windows that I use. I've reached a point in my life where I will happily stop using services/doing business with companies based on some of the stuff Microsoft is doing, like the ad integration, AI nonsense, forced Microsoft account and data harvesting, and the awful security threat that Recall was (and probably will be again when they repackage it and try it again). I'd honestly still be using 7 if it was still supported because I liked it much more than I do 10.
For Windows 11, it would be an ad for Hitler instead of just a picture.
The embed on my client only gave me the middle 2 panels for context and honestly still funny
I'm still running Vista, what's wrong with it?
Probably this whole list, there is lots of code shared with Windows 7, but who really knows? Nobody is checking against Vista anymore.
I've actually heard mostly positive nostalgia for Vista recently. I think it might have been a situation where they released earlier than they should have, and so only the later versions were worthy.
But also, do you even Linux, bro?
Edit: Other comments are saying it just had really high hardware requirements.
Specifically high hardware requirements that they absolutely lied about
They’ll never top Windows 95 to be honest.
I do not Linux. Actually, I don't even computer. I do everything on my phone. The Vista machine is something offline to store photos and some docs.
Whoops, this was supposed to be a comment reply, not a separate statement.