Why is Windows Vista bad?

[Deleted User]

I wanted to be going into the reasons why people thought and STILL think that Vista is the worst. Well, why is Windows Vista considered this way? Let's go back to the development of it. The original release date was supposed to be 2003, and Vista was supposed to be minimalistic, but Microsoft's developers added lots of little programs and tools, and they weren't sure of what was considered a major add-on. A great example of this is in build 4074, everything the developers had was thrown in this build because they knew all of these unfinished and buggy programs were never going to sse the light of day, as they were just too much for the system since they used lots of memory. After this they scrapped development for longhorn just a couple of hours after that build and decided to work on Codename Vista. They added lots of useless programs yet AGAIN, seemingly not learning their lesson, and Windows Vista got released in 06.
Another reason besides the fact that windows vista requires a lot of memory and eats a lot of it all on its own, is the way Windows Vista looks at free memory or space. When Vista sees free memory going unused, it sees this as bad because it could be used for the system among other things. That's definitely not the way it was in XP.

Also, when it comes to compatibility, Vista was not good at running older programs meant for older operating systems such as Windows 2000 and Windows XP, which were the two most popular systems in 2004/5.

Vista demanded faster and much better hardware, and most people were very mad to learn that the aero UI and designs couldn't run on their systems.

Now don't get mad, but I personally love Vista. I think they made a big flop and messed up during development probably due to miscommunication, but SP2 is pretty much just as good as Windows 7. They introduced different versions such as Enterprise and Ultimate, many different types of the OS depending on your needs, I find that a cool touch. Also, with a trick it can recieve updates until January 2020. I really like it and it was one of the first OSes I've had.

It runs fairly well on a VM Imo

 

[xXxSwagnemitexXx]

SP2 is okay but it to me it felt too buggy and slow

 

[Reploid]

worst cause worse than all its successors, which indeed makes it worst.

 

[the_randomizer]

Vista was rushed, much like Windows Mistake Edition.

 

[mikey420]

Vista was a buggy unstable OS with a huge range of problems. The update patches made it much more stable but it was still pretty bad. The big issue I had however was the OS layout. It felt clunky and complicated to navigate

 

[leon315]

I heard from Shelton Cooper, that If uncle Bill Gates paid too much attention to Charity for Afrikan kids instead focusing entirely on Vista's development, Vista could became the best successor of windows XP.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

Anyone who still thinks Vista is bad is just following the le me me or are just ignorant that, y'know, OS's change after release. As you mentioned, after SP2 released it became a fairly "stable", decent OS for the most part, all the updates it received helped make it at least usable as a daily driver without issue.

The main problem with Vista on release lies both with it's heavy system requirements vs XP, and with hardware manufacturers releasing "Vista ready!" PCs that were not, in fact, Vista Ready whatsoever. You mentioned people complaining that Aero didn't support their hardware, but this was less a problem with the user themselves being a bit dumb and more a problem with hardware manufacturers releasing PCs that only just hit the bare minimum requirements of Vista...which is less than what Aero happens to require. Consumers would then buy these PCs, because they say "Vista ready!" so surely they should support everything Vista does...and then find out that what they bought didn't, actually, and felt they were "missing" a part of the OS.

Then there were performance issues, in part because Vista eats a lot of it's required resources as mentioned, and also in part because driver manufacturers were releasing drivers that weren't, for the most part, all that optimized for Vista. So games and programs and such would benchmark much worse on Vista than XP, since the drivers were shite, and as such it was blamed on Vista itself, and not hardware manufacturers. The other part does lie with Windows though, which was the bug with storage management which was significantly slow and buggy and almost downright unusable for certain applications. All of these issues were fixed, eventually, but nobody wanted to keep using a buggy OS, and Windows 7 released a few months after SP2 so everyone just sort of migrated there.

Windows 7 is still the superior OS vs Vista for pretty much any hardware config that either OS will run on, so Vista just gets ignored and forgotten these days or hated on by everyone who loves taking part in le me mes.

 

[sj33]

It's mainly the launch state that was bad, and it wasn't as much a problem with the OS as hardware and software support.

For example, I had a SoundBlaster X-Fi at the time and Vista would keep cutting the sound from the right speaker, constantly. This was due to poor driver support thanks to the new audio framework. This wasn't fixed for about a year, and these were the days when separate sound cards were common. I switch to XP 64-bit.

But the final SP2 state of Vista is pretty close to what we ended up with in Windows 7.

Windows ME was much worse and they had no excuse - there was no new frameworks for growing pains, just a poor operating system.

 

[Originality]

I had an ME machine for a while before upgrading to XP. I never actually experienced any of the issues everybody else talked about.

And when I upgraded to Vista, my hardware at the time was fine for running it. Sure I experienced the occasional slowdown, but it didn’t get in the way of my games so I didn’t care.

Of course, Windows 7 and W10 we’re superior in every way, and the only OS I had issues with was W8. From my own experience since the days of Windows 3.1, 8 was the worst. I couldn’t upgrade my Windows 8 Surface Pro to 8.1 fast enough, and then to W10.

 

[LukeyWolf]

Well, Vista required a huge step up for hardware for XP and people generally didn't have the money to upgrade there machines, it was also pretty big at the time and it generally ran slower than XP (as it was bigger and all)

 

[Deleted User]

Vista had a very rocky development cycle with lots of features such as WinFS that were planned but ultimately never came to fruition.
The overall experience of Vista was shown to be quite horrific on XP era machines, due to the graphical effects of Aero eating up precious resources, which made people more hesitant about upgrading to Vista, as concerns about hardware compatibility were raised.
UAC was also obnoxiously implemented at the time which led people to turning it off, which led to no real increased security over XP.
Drivers were also horribly implemented on Vista which led to poor hardware compatibility for devices such as printers, which limited Vista's impact on certain markets such as education.
Over time it got better with service packs being released which ironed out all of the problems with Vista, but by then the damage was done and consumers were sticking with XP until 7 got released. Nowadays using Vista is pointless as no new patches are being provided, however with SP's applied it can be used on a machine from the era with smooth operation.

 

[Lacius]

Vista demanded faster and much better hardware, and most people were very mad to learn that the aero UI and designs couldn't run on their systems.

This is the main reason why Windows Vista developed a bad reputation. It was being installed and shipped with a lot of hardware designed for Windows XP, and so it gained the reputation of being slow and buggy. That being said, there are other reasons why Windows Vista wasn't very popular. To this day, it has some unfixed bugs. Windows 7 can do just about everything Windows Vista can do and more, and it's also lighter on system resources than Windows Vista.

 

[CallmeBerto]

100% what Tom said. Give that man a like.

 

[Uiaad]

If you want a truly horrible version of windows try Windows Me. It was created buggy and it died buggy.

 

[Deleted User]

If you want a truly horrible version of windows try Windows Me. It was created buggy and it died buggy.

I installed it once and none of the drivers worked so I had to look at a tiny screen that did not fit the resolution with only 16 colors, a lot of bugginess, and no sound. What a great experience.

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Windows 98 and even Windows 95 work good for me when it comes to drivers and old games and old program support

 

[comput3rus3r]

If you compare Vista to Win10, Vista is a masterpiece. lol

 

[Uiaad]

@WintendoZone i have only ever come across 1 machine were windows Me worked well ... sadly the hard drive finally gave up last year. when i finally get around to restoring it ... it will not be running Me

 

[Deleted User]

If you compare Vista to Win10, Vista is a masterpiece. lol

I can see what you mean, but a lot of the stuff that was planned for Vista did end up showing back in Windows 10. So I guess Windows 10 is basically what Longhorn could have been had it been finished without major problems.

 

[Pacheko17]

If you compare Vista to Win10, Vista is a masterpiece. lol

Just... no.
I'm a Linux user and think that statement is ridiculous.

 

[comput3rus3r]

Just... no.
I'm a Linux user and think that statement is ridiculous.

You're a linux user so what does that have to do with windows vista or win10? your statement is irrelevant.