Why Windows Vista Sucked

I too built a whole new system for Vista and didn't have any issues. I think a lot of the problems people experienced were from upgrading with legacy devices. Not saying this is excusable at all, just why my experience was different from my friends.

My main complaint was that it seemed to access my hard drive all the time. I had an old Maxtor that was loud as heck and it got pretty annoying hearing the click clack all the time.
 
Bandalo said:
I used Vista from the time it was released until the time Win 7 rolled out. It had a few issues here and there, but I don't remember it being any more painful than XP or the early days of Win7 for that matter.
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I disagree. Win7 was essentially Vista SP3. So there was no change in driver model, or memory mapping, or UAC or anything drastic like what happened in Vista.

So Win7 was very smooth sailing compared to Vista launch.
 
Snowdog said:
I disagree. Win7 was essentially Vista SP3. So there was no change in driver model, or memory mapping, or UAC or anything drastic like what happened in Vista.

So Win7 was very smooth sailing compared to Vista launch.
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It's all anecdotal evidence for the most part. I remember a few hiccups here and there with both early Vista and early Win7.
 
Bandalo said:
It's all anecdotal evidence for the most part. I remember a few hiccups here and there with both early Vista and early Win7.
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Well personal anecdotes are one thing, but you can see many people complaining about real Vista issues with bad drivers, memory model change related crashes and UAC overkill.

Those were real serious changes that caused widespread grief during the Vista launch.

What were the changes in Windows 7 that caused similar grief? IMO there were NONE.
 
I don't think it sucked. Sure, it blew, but I don't think it sucked.
 
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Snowdog said:
Well personal anecdotes are one thing, but you can see many people complaining about real Vista issues with bad drivers, memory model change related crashes and UAC overkill.

Those were real serious changes that caused widespread grief during the Vista launch.

What were the changes in Windows 7 that caused similar grief? IMO there were NONE.
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I remember quite a a few app issues, and a number of games that wouldn't work in Win7. Granted a lot of those games were the GWL editions. Fewer driver issues, since 7 used the same drivers in general. There were some hoops to jump through with "unsigned" drivers IIRC.
 
bigdogchris said:
2GB of ram and a fast HDD is all Vista needed to be fine. I thought it was a great OS, it just had a few kinks to work out.
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Exactly this. Everyone with lots of RAM and striped drives wondered what all the complaining was about.
 
I can tell you from a recent experience for a post I was going to make in the coming weeks why Vista sucks in one aspect - multiple GPU performance, or rather the lack thereof. Compared to Windows XP I saw a good 20-30% drop, sometimes far more depending on the game. It doesn't matter which driver release I chose, there was a persistent stutter and chop that was not present under XP.

For single GPU or quad core systems with 2GB or more of RAM, it's fine though. Just should point out it's not for SLI or Crossfire systems running dual core CPUs.
 
Just a few years until they say this about Windows 10. Not a criticism of them either.
 
Monkey God said:
80% driver issues - vendor fault mostly
10% UAC - just turn it off
9% slow file copy - which did indeed suck
1% misc BS

Overall though it was much better than XP, even 64bit XP.
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I would add 10% hardware limits (Vista 64 bit needed almost 2x the memory XP 32 bit needed), and 10% Vista Bugs (pre SP1)

Yes, that adds up to more than 100%, but that's how bad Vista was :p
 
Wow that was the driest and most over long article I've read in a long time.

DIdn't really cover 'Vista' at all and just the politics of MS at the time. I've read more informative and interesting articles on the history of Vista I have to say.

The main issue I had with Vista was the constant disk thrashing and over zealous Disk Search that could appear on some machines.

I think its still possibly the best looking OS MS made.
 
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least from my perspective, I had zero issues with Vista. I ran it sold from 2009ish or whatever until sometime last year. It never let me down. Same install that whole time.
 
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daglesj said:
The main issue I had with Vista was the constant disk thrashing and over zealous Disk Search that could appear on some machines.

I think its still possibly the best looking OS MS made.
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Agreed. The disk thrashing is really obnixious. Especially when it decides to run the search service while trying to run a game and your performance tanks. Thanks for reminding me of that. If it wasn't for poor multi-GPU performance it would be on said system despite that.
 
MrTryfe said:
As far as end users were concerned, the lack of memory was probably the sticking point, IIRC. I was working service desk back then, and a large number of tickets dealt with users complaining about sluggish performance. The machines were HPs from 02-04, and mostly equipped with 256MB RAM. Not an issue at all with XP, but Vista presented some problems. Hell, my Dell with 512MB RAM had issues. Admittedly, my company should have been to blame for this one. Got a bit too overeager to stay current, and thought the recommended hardware requirements for Vista were a bit rubbish. If I'm not mistaken, Vista even refused to install if it detected less than 512, but there was a way to get around it.
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Not long after Vista released I was working at a couple different computer repair places and Vista kept those two businesses afloat. We had people coming in all the time with new "Walmart" specials, typically HP, with far too little RAM to run Vista.
People would buy computers that were "Vista Ready" with Windows XP and after upgrading their computer would run like crap. And all they wanted was a computer that could run Sims 3 or 4 and the 80 expansion packs that were out.
The second largest issue we came across was print drivers that were not updated to Vista in a timely fashion. It took many months for the large printer manufacturers to update their recently released printers and if you had an older printer you might as well forget it.
 
I think the biggest issue was MS letting OEMs put it on EVERYTHING. They sold Vista shitboxes at BestBuy for $250 with 512mb of RAM and dual core Pentium processors.
 
Tiberian said:
To all those folk that still continue to stand by their position that "Vista is 95% of what Windows 7 is..." you just haven't been really paying attention or apparently used Windows 7 vs Vista for long extended periods of time. :D

I mean I get where the attitude and the opinion comes from, but geez, it's quite a bit more than 5% difference for the two OSes, really.

That's all I'm gonna say on it since I already know where this thread is headed like so many others. :D
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So you have no argument, and think people will figure out your own little world of fail.
 
Vista was a pile of poo. Ran slow even on decent and good hardware. Anyone remember gadgets? Peeps can add an almost unlimited number of them and you couldn't scroll down nor close them properly. This caused system to essentially lock up. Anytime you did any thing to a file, it would take ages. Even sending a 1kb file to the trash bin would take 30mins. So many things just crashed and didn't work. And did I mention slow? It was even slow at being slow.
 
Vista was a necessary evil, the guy complained about Bill Gates master plan and it was mainly to kill a lot of older backwards compatibilities that was causing many issues with moving forward.

I mean, look at how Creative could pretty much render your entire machine useless using their "official" Vista driver.
 
egads said:
My main complaint was that it seemed to access my hard drive all the time. I had an old Maxtor that was loud as heck and it got pretty annoying hearing the click clack all the time.
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daglesj said:
The main issue I had with Vista was the constant disk thrashing and over zealous Disk Search that could appear on some machines.
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Yes, Vista had aggressive Prefetch, Superfetch, Search and Indexing. That was the extent of my problems. Just a few clicks away to configure, maybe a few registry changes and all was well.

I personally thank Vista for twisting Microsoft's arm to optimize and rewrite portions of the OS to give us Windows 7.
 
Trimlock said:
Vista was a necessary evil, the guy complained about Bill Gates master plan and it was mainly to kill a lot of older backwards compatibilities that was causing many issues with moving forward.

I mean, look at how Creative could pretty much render your entire machine useless using their "official" Vista driver.
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The guy described Bill Gates' master plan as C#/.NET, WinFS and WPF. That combo didn't kill anything except Microsoft's future.
 
blkt said:
Yes, Vista had aggressive Prefetch, Superfetch, Search and Indexing. That was the extent of my problems. Just a few clicks away to configure, maybe a few registry changes and all was well.

I personally thank Vista for twisting Microsoft's arm to optimize and rewrite portions of the OS to give us Windows 7.
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Same, that pre fetch took for ever on HDD's and would constantly rewrite the entire cache for no reason what so ever. Was nice when it worked but it was really hard on the drives.
 
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I keep hearing how Vista is supposedly almost the same as 7 and that the only reason Vista sucked was lack of powerful hardware. That's a load of bullshit. You could take almost any of those "crappy" Vista Ready machines and throw 7 on it when 7 was released and those machines would run so much better under 7. Vista required much more powerful hardware to run halfway decent while 7 would run as good or better on most machines which ran XP decent. I specifically remember a friend installing 7 on his old ass AMD single core laptop with 512 MB of RAM which originally had XP. 7 ran better than even a fresh install of XP. Vista would have made that machine useless.

I guess everyone also forgot about the shitty network issues on Vista. I had to use a registry hack to get my gigabit NIC to run faster than a 10base-t NIC because of the extremely stupid network QoS. At least some people have already mentioned the way overboard aggressive prefetch and indexing. My Q6600 with 4 gig of ram took five minutes to get to a usable desktop due to the overly aggressive prefetch.

There were plenty of problems with Vista beyond teething issues such as drivers and UAC. I always gave Vista a pass on those two issues because a brand new OS is always going to have large teething problems with drivers no matter what. I also understood why UAC was such a pain in the ass. Sure, that was partially MS's fault due to all the previous OSes allowing anything and everything to run with admin privileges but it was also the fault of a lot of shitty programmers being lazy and coding their software to have admin privileges when it definitely wasn't needed.

It's been a while but I'm pretty sure that I didn't even touch Vista as a daily driver OS until well after SP1 was out and I still had these issues.
 
Vista sucked because the hardware available at the time wasn't up for the job of running an OS with much higher memory and cpu demand. I mean laptops with 1GB or even 512MB memory came with vista pre-installed.
 
The main problem that gave Vista such a bad rap was that a lot of the pre-built machines were so underpowered and had very little ram, 2GB or less on most machines.
I ran it on my Q6600 with 4GB ram and had no issues at all, eventually upgraded to 8GB of ram.
vista-sp2-system-info.jpg
 
I thought Vista w
Zepher said:
The main problem that gave Vista such a bad rap was that a lot of the pre-built machines were so underpowered and had very little ram, 2GB or less on most machines.
I ran it on my Q6600 with 4GB ram and had no issues at all, eventually upgraded to 8GB of ram.
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Ah I remember my Q6600 machine. I believe I only had 4GB tho but I had no issues with Vista. Like others said Vista issues fell more on OEM and driver development.
 
Window Vista sucked because they killed dedicated audio processors. Its never been quite the same since in video games too :(
 
SmokeRngs said:
I keep hearing how Vista is supposedly almost the same as 7 and that the only reason Vista sucked was lack of powerful hardware. That's a load of bullshit. You could take almost any of those "crappy" Vista Ready machines and throw 7 on it when 7 was released and those machines would run so much better under 7. Vista required much more powerful hardware to run halfway decent while 7 would run as good or better on most machines which ran XP decent. I specifically remember a friend installing 7 on his old ass AMD single core laptop with 512 MB of RAM which originally had XP. 7 ran better than even a fresh install of XP. Vista would have made that machine useless.

I guess everyone also forgot about the shitty network issues on Vista. I had to use a registry hack to get my gigabit NIC to run faster than a 10base-t NIC because of the extremely stupid network QoS. At least some people have already mentioned the way overboard aggressive prefetch and indexing. My Q6600 with 4 gig of ram took five minutes to get to a usable desktop due to the overly aggressive prefetch.

There were plenty of problems with Vista beyond teething issues such as drivers and UAC. I always gave Vista a pass on those two issues because a brand new OS is always going to have large teething problems with drivers no matter what. I also understood why UAC was such a pain in the ass. Sure, that was partially MS's fault due to all the previous OSes allowing anything and everything to run with admin privileges but it was also the fault of a lot of shitty programmers being lazy and coding their software to have admin privileges when it definitely wasn't needed.

It's been a while but I'm pretty sure that I didn't even touch Vista as a daily driver OS until well after SP1 was out and I still had these issues.
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Windows 7 was the first Windows by Microsoft to ever take LESS resources to run than the one before it. You're completely right about Vista, that's why netbooks coming out back then were all running XP, because they simply couldn't handle Vista requirements.
 
I put Windows 7 beta on my Dell Mini 9 and it ran fantastic. I only had a 16GB SSD in it so there was only a couple of GB free after Windows was installed.
mini.jpg
 
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