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.
Was techie. Hated vista with a passion. 7 was waaaay better
Yeah no, Windows 11 IS far worse than (current) Windows 10
100%. The enshittification is accelerating. Which is leading people to Linux hopefully
Any moment now
Yeah, their momentum is no joke. This may accelerate the shift towards Linux somewhat.
Kind of the same story for the Fediverse.
I’m expecting that Steam on Linux is going to be what drives it.
The Steam Deck can be used as a Linux computer and almost a turnkey way for a manufacturer to build a Steam computer without Windows.
Have a Windows for gaming, going to switch to Linux once I can get a good deal on an external hard drive to back it up. Can confirm I’m making the switch because of the enshittification.
I’m in the same situation but also use windows for Ableton and protocols. My steamdeck has really convinced me that Linux is ready for gaming tho
Yeah no, Windows 11 IS far worse than Windows 10
Yeah no, Windows 10 IS far worse than Windows 8
Yeah no, Windows 8 IS far worse than Windows 7
Perpetual Windows $VERSION_THAT_I_GREW_UP_WITH isn’t bad. No, it’s just this new one that’s terrible.
No, they’ve alternated between good and bad ever since 98.
98 - good
ME - bad
XP - good
Vista - bad
7 - good
8 - bad
10 - good (eventually)
11 - bad
98 was ok, ME sucked, XP was ok, Vista sucked, 7 was ok, 8 sucked, 10 is ok, 11 sucks.
98SE was very good for me. Also NT 2000. After XP I stopped really bothering except for work occasionally. 11 sucks donkey’s ass.
yeah, 98 was trash. 98SE was good
Nobody said 8 was better than 10.
I am.
Blasphemy!
8 changed a lot of UI for no reason other than to chase the mobile market. 8.1 reverted a lot of that and people liked it, but the damage to 8’s reputation had already been done.
If they kept the edition alive for a few years 8.1 might be remembered as a redemption story like Windows 98 Second Edition, but they rushed 10 out the door - as a free upgrade, no less - to get back the goodwill they’d lost.
I thought 10 was an improvement on 8, in part because they walked back some changes to 8.
I have yet to hear of a reason to go to 11.
The version that i grew up with was terrible
I don’t remember anyone saying 10 was worse than 8. Maybe buggier on launch, but stylistically it worked more like 7 than 8 did
Unpopular opinion that I have no justification for: I don’t mind windows 11 all that much
It’s certainly better than Windows 8 and it’s awful mandatory touch interface.
Other than messing around with the beta for half an hour, I thankfully never had to use it.
Oh it was great.
Want the regular desktop? Well now it’s an app you need to open!
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)
Did you find a solution for having the taskbar to the left?
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.
Boiled frog
For Windows 11, it would be an ad for Hitler instead of just a picture.
I’m confused. You think Windows 11 is better than Windows 10?
Yeah, idk, ive never actually used win 11 and have barely used win 10. It just a meme.
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
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.
Android phone or iPhone?
Android.
Then you do Linux!
They’ll never top Windows 95 to be honest.
7 was amazing, this comic guy is a moron.
The hover-over text says “Disclaimer: I have not actually tried the beta yet. I hear it’s quite pleasant and hardly Hitler-y at all.”
