Why Windows Vista flopped so hard

CupheadtheCritic · Mar 25, 2023

What can I say about Windows Vista... Well, it's a poorly coded OS that barely sold, but WHY was it poorly coded, and HOW did it flop so hard?
To remember this we need to look back to 2004, when Microsoft released Microsoft Longhorn, the preliminary OS that soon became Windows Vista. Now, Microsoft Longhorn had a plethora of features, but was picked off to the bare minimum when it became Windows Vista. This may have had to do with PCs in 2006 not being great at holding too much code, but let's dig into the reasons it failed so hard and only caused Windows XP sales to increase.

REASON ONE: IT CRASHED ALL THE TIME. No, this is not a joke. Windows Vista was heavy on crashes. Load up Solitaire and Vista crashed. Pull up a website and Vista crashed. Click on an app? Crash. Log in?! Crash. You get the point. EVERYTHING CRASHES. The crashes were so bad that even APPLE had a bone to pick with Windows Vista with their "Get a Mac" ad campaigns. Jesus Christ...

REASON TWO: It lacked what made Windows XP so great. Now, Windows Vista was made as the successor to Windows XP ("The Wow starts Now?" Yeah, right...), but the problem was was that Vista lacked the factor to Windows XP's success. XP WAS A LOT MORE USER FRIENDLY. Hell, even Microsoft DOS was more user friendly, and you had to have fifty Harvard degrees to know how to work it!

REASON THREE: Windows 7 put Vista down when released. Three years after Windows Vista released, Microsoft released Windows 7. Now, Windows 7 was both a modernized Windows XP and an improved upon Windows Vista. It ultimately became the last nail in the coffin for Windows Vista, as 7 managed to run for 11 years, and Vista was left behind in the dust to rot.

If you thought Windows Vista was bad, Windows ME was even WORSE, but that's a story for another time.

The Catboy · Mar 25, 2023

Vista ruined Windows for me when it fucked up an install of C&C Generals Zero Hour. I don’t remember how it got fucked up, but it did and I jumped to Linux after that

linuxares · Mar 25, 2023

Driver compatibility, a new kernel mindset, they tried to reinvent stuff that was already fixed. Example the TCPIP stack had bugs fixed in XP. But then they reinvented it and said bugs came back. Audio drivers... oh god the audio and wifi drivers...
Also the biggest that made Windows 7 great right out of the box, same mistake they did with Windows 8.

They didn't let the Public test and report problems. So once it was released, everyone expected drivers etc work out of the box. As we all know, they didn't...

Jayro · Mar 25, 2023

Vista was such a bloated turd, that I went ACTIVELY searching for a new OS outside of Windows and Mac OS. And that's when I ran into Ubuntu over and over in my Google searches, and decided to try a "LiveCD" of the OS, v7.04 "Feisty Fawn". I was amazed that I was able to boot into and try out the entire OS, basically without many limitations, from a CD-R... That blew my mind. And the fact that ALL my hardware at the time worked magically without having to install drivers, also blew my mind. While I wasn't able to fully replace my OS with Linux, I DID manage to find out how to install them side-by-side, and have them co-exist on my machine. I still dual-boot Windows and Linux today, though I use Linux Mint now over Ubuntu. The Cinnamon Desktop just provides me with everything I need,, and Mint comes with a lot of "in-house" software the devs make that are just real quality of life things to sweeten the deal. Like having "Open as Root" baked right in to the right-click context menu of the file explorer. Or the backup software. Very good shit. I even got to suggest that Linux Mint 5 be named "Elyssa", and they took my suggestion! That was pretty cool.

Long story short, I have to thank Windows Vista for being SUCH A TURD that I turned into a Linux fan.

CupheadtheCritic · Mar 25, 2023

The Catboy said:
Vista ruined Windows for me when it fucked up an install of C&C Generals Zero Hour. I don’t remember how it got fucked up, but it did and I jumped to Linux after that

And prices ruined Apple for me.

Post automatically merged: Mar 25, 2023

Jayro said:
Vista was such a bloated turd, that I went ACTIVELY searching for a new OS outside of Windows and Mac OS. And that's when I ran into Ubuntu over and over in my Google searches, and decided to try a "LiveCD" of the OS, v7.04 "Feisty Fawn". I was amazed that I was able to boot into and try out the entire OS, basically without many limitations, from a CD-R... That blew my mind. And the fact that ALL my hardware at the time worked magically without having to install drivers, also blew my mind. While I wasn't able to fully replace my OS with Linux, I DID manage to find out how to install them side-by-side, and have them co-exist on my machine. I still dual-boot Windows and Linux today, though I use Linux Mint now over Ubuntu. The Cinnamon Desktop just provides me with everything I need,, and Mint comes with a lot of "in-house" software the devs make that are just real quality of life things to sweeten the deal. Like having "Open as Root" baked right in to the right-click context menu of the file explorer. Or the backup software. Very good shit. I even got to suggest that Linux Mint 5 be named "Elyssa", and they took my suggestion! That was pretty cool.

Long story short, I have to thank Windows Vista for being SUCH A TURD that I turned into a Linux fan.

As someone who used XP, 7, and 10 I can't feel your pain as much.
Because the VM install fails too much

Jayro · Mar 25, 2023

CupheadtheCritic said:
And prices ruined Apple for me.

Their prices, obviously are absurd... But for me, it's beyond the price that ruins Apple for me. It's their stark grey, cold image. Their closed ecosystem where you're not allowed to see what runs in the background. You have no clue what the OS is doing at any given time. The OS navigations are anything but friendly or intuitive. Trying to do anything in MacOS is abysmal due to how Finder works (Closing the red X should kill the app, not make it a background priority). iOS navigation feels 100% backwards from how a phone should operate. Android comes naturally. I used a school iPad a few times and wanted to throw it out the windows with how frustrating it was to even do simple things on it. The pathetic PC hardware Apple uses is also not worthy of it's price. They use off-the-shelf parts, and usually tweak it to seem proprietary. (Apple-branded SSDs in macbooks that aren't soldered-in are a fine example of this.) Then there's iCloud. They give you barely enough free storage to tease you into how great and convenient it is, then you have to pay for more to keep it. And then you get the planned obsolescence... Updates that slow devices and only 2 to 3 years of update support. Nah, fuck all that. I've had it with Apple's trash.

godreborn · Mar 25, 2023

I'm still an amateur at linux, but I have five distros ready to go with a virtual drive for each using wslv2. I'm learning more and more as I compile tons of shit. I prefer linux when compiling than windows most of the time, unless it's Nintendo stuff or requires visual studio/android studio.

izy · Mar 26, 2023

the other main problem is the system requirements were underspecced for oems

512mb minimum and 1gb recommended
aero highly needed proper hardware acceleration ontop of widgets being hard on cpu load
people upgrading from xp to vista or vista basic systems basically just about met minimum spec

that say 1gb recommended but vista only viably ran at 2GB ram or more which was a lot for the time

Now imagine all those pcs and laptops especially running intel gpus and 512mb of vram that was shared with the system
so essentially you running a 384mb ram pc
this would be fast enough on xp but on vista there just wasnt enough resources

even myself personally rather held on to 2gbb of ram and xp 64bit ( a right pain)
until windows 7 beta/rc builds were out before i swapped to using it as my full time OS before release

(well that and the 9700gt didnt work on xp 64bit memory allocation errors)

they realised how bad it was and even though windows 7 and 8/8.1 were marketed for higher system requirements they both ran better than vista on the same hardware and older systems

also UaC in vista was ass, literally asking you are you sure you want to do every single thing
im physically ingrained to turn off UAC in every pc i use now

CupheadtheCritic · Mar 26, 2023

Jayro said:
Their prices, obviously are absurd... But for me, it's beyond the price that ruins Apple for me. It's their stark grey, cold image. Their closed ecosystem where you're not allowed to see what runs in the background. You have no clue what the OS is doing at any given time. The OS navigations are anything but friendly or intuitive. Trying to do anything in MacOS is abysmal due to how Finder works (Closing the red X should kill the app, not make it a background priority). iOS navigation feels 100% backwards from how a phone should operate. Android comes naturally. I used a school iPad a few times and wanted to throw it out the windows with how frustrating it was to even do simple things on it. The pathetic PC hardware Apple uses is also not worthy of it's price. They use off-the-shelf parts, and usually tweak it to seem proprietary. (Apple-branded SSDs in macbooks that aren't soldered-in are a fine example of this.) Then there's iCloud. They give you barely enough free storage to tease you into how great and convenient it is, then you have to pay for more to keep it. And then you get the planned obsolescence... Updates that slow devices and only 2 to 3 years of update support. Nah, fuck all that. I've had it with Apple's trash.

I still use Windows to this day for the sake of accessibility and gameplay and GoAnimate, since Apple can't handle that for shit.

Hayato213 · Mar 26, 2023

Driver issue, had a lot problem back then with gpu driver, where it would randomly crashed.

You know Microsoft create a good version of Windows then the next one is bad, that been the case with windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11.

CupheadtheCritic · Mar 26, 2023

Hayato213 said:
Driver issue, had a lot problem back then with gpu driver, where it would randomly crashed.

You know Microsoft create a good version of Windows then the next one is bad, that been the case with windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11.

11 is decent tbh, but it can feel weird to use at times.

VinsCool · Mar 26, 2023

Windows 7 is basically Windows Vista done right, at the end, things eventually worked out, at least.

Ryab · Mar 26, 2023

CupheadtheCritic said:
What can I say about Windows Vista... Well, it's a poorly coded OS that barely sold, but WHY was it poorly coded, and HOW did it flop so hard?
To remember this we need to look back to 2004, when Microsoft released Microsoft Longhorn, the preliminary OS that soon became Windows Vista. Now, Microsoft Longhorn had a plethora of features, but was picked off to the bare minimum when it became Windows Vista. This may have had to do with PCs in 2006 not being great at holding too much code, but let's dig into the reasons it failed so hard and only caused Windows XP sales to increase.

REASON ONE: IT CRASHED ALL THE TIME. No, this is not a joke. Windows Vista was heavy on crashes. Load up Solitaire and Vista crashed. Pull up a website and Vista crashed. Click on an app? Crash. Log in?! Crash. You get the point. EVERYTHING CRASHES. The crashes were so bad that even APPLE had a bone to pick with Windows Vista with their "Get a Mac" ad campaigns. Jesus Christ...

REASON TWO: It lacked what made Windows XP so great. Now, Windows Vista was made as the successor to Windows XP ("The Wow starts Now?" Yeah, right...), but the problem was was that Vista lacked the factor to Windows XP's success. XP WAS A LOT MORE USER FRIENDLY. Hell, even Microsoft DOS was more user friendly, and you had to have fifty Harvard degrees to know how to work it!

REASON THREE: Windows 7 put Vista down when released. Three years after Windows Vista released, Microsoft released Windows 7. Now, Windows 7 was both a modernized Windows XP and an improved upon Windows Vista. It ultimately became the last nail in the coffin for Windows Vista, as 7 managed to run for 11 years, and Vista was left behind in the dust to rot.

If you thought Windows Vista was bad, Windows ME was even WORSE, but that's a story for another time.

Yes, much like Windows Windows 98, Vista was rather unstable and crashed a ton. However the real killer was Aero UI. People complained about it being super laggy, because Aero was literally too much for most systems at the time. After people assumed it was terrible devs stopped porting software and making drivers. The reason Windows 7 worked was because people had better computers by the time it rolled around.

SAIYAN48 · Mar 26, 2023

The sys requirement jump from XP to Vista was insane. I find it amusing how Win 11 had memory leaks in Explorer, which hadn't really happened since the Sidebar was part of the Explorer Process in Longhorn.

Marc_LFD · Mar 26, 2023

I had an Acer laptop with Vista originally installed, but since the OS was so buggy it just annoyed me enough to go back to XP instead which was a much better experience. That being said, years after Microsoft made Vista very stable with SP2 although at that point it was too little too late for anyone to give a shit about Vista.

Windows OSes for me:

Windows 95 - Good
Windows 98 - Good (this is the one that has the rocket ship game? been wanting to play it again for years now)
Windows Me - Bad (not just bad, it's: GFY, Windows Me!)
Windows 2000 - Good (I loved this OS so much)
Windows XP - Good (it's legendary)
Windows Vista - Bad (with SP2 it's good, but no, I'm not going near it)
Windows 7 - Good (such a brilliant Windows OS so it's a shame Microsoft discontinued it)
Windows 8 - Bad (I guess it's good for tablets... Except we use Windows for desktop/laptops!)
Windows 10 - Good (well, I can't stand the Home/Pro versions as they're filled with bloatware, but love the LTSC version)
Windows 11 - Bad (it's not totally bad, it's Windows 10 reskinned with more bloatware, bs, restrictions, and limitations)

Let's see if Microsoft fucks up Windows 12, too.

Post automatically merged: Mar 26, 2023

CupheadtheCritic said:
11 is decent tbh, but it can feel weird to use at times.

An OS shouldn't be just "decent," it should be reliable and fantastic. One comes to mind with those two words: Windows 7

RIP, Windows 7.

CupheadtheCritic · Mar 26, 2023

Marc_LFD said:
An OS shouldn't be just "decent," it should be reliable and fantastic. One comes to mind with those two words: Windows 7

RIP, Windows 7.

Then there's Windows XP, which was Windows 7 before Windows 7.

orangy57 · Mar 26, 2023

the thing about vista crashing every 5 seconds is kinda exaggerated, but from my experience no other version of windows has ever left the computer completely unusable without a full format of the drive. Could've been from me trying to install endless softonic mario games with a ton of adware onto the family computer back in the day.
I still have the original vista hard drive which I was able to pull the family pictures off of, trying to actually get it to boot is basically impossible since it just BSoDs while loading the startup programs.

SylverReZ · Mar 26, 2023

Linus explains here the possible cause of Vista's failure.

Psionic Roshambo · Mar 26, 2023

Vista was a great OS if you had top of the line up to date hardware (Drivers..) the issue most people had with it was trying to run it on budget hardware at the time... Or hardware they thought was good. "I just paid 3K for this Dell machine last month!!!" Pull up the specs and yeah... not everything in it was up to snuff.

Plus the driver model it took a few months for hardware companies to resign drivers for Vista.

The pretty pretty OS demanded a nice video card, or you had to turn everything way down less your shiny new PC with that bottom end video card ran like ass.

I worked at Dell during the transition from XP to Vista doing tech support at the time.

Basically if you built your own PC with enthusiast hardware at the time, you had a wonderful experience with almost zero crashes ever (I think my machine at the time crashed a few time until AMD got new drivers that where better optimized for Vista.)

In some aspects it was too ahead of it's time.

Marc_LFD · Mar 26, 2023

Psionic Roshambo said:
Vista was a great OS if you had top of the line up to date hardware (Drivers..) the issue most people had with it was trying to run it on budget hardware at the time... Or hardware they thought was good. "I just paid 3K for this Dell machine last month!!!" Pull up the specs and yeah... not everything in it was up to snuff.

Plus the driver model it took a few months for hardware companies to resign drivers for Vista.

The pretty pretty OS demanded a nice video card, or you had to turn everything way down less your shiny new PC with that bottom end video card ran like ass.

I worked at Dell during the transition from XP to Vista doing tech support at the time.

Basically if you built your own PC with enthusiast hardware at the time, you had a wonderful experience with almost zero crashes ever (I think my machine at the time crashed a few time until AMD got new drivers that where better optimized for Vista.)

In some aspects it was too ahead of it's time.

I had a laptop with it and the experience was not great at all, in fact, it was better off with XP instead.

I guess with Vista SP2 it was indeed a great OS, except for the fact that was too late for most people as the damage was already done.

By the time they'd release Vista SP2 there was a superior Windows OS: Windows 7

Windows 7 was so good it felt almost perfect and unbreakable. Are newer Windows OSes better than 7? No.

Why Windows Vista flopped so hard

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