Why Vista is So hated, and Why 7 is doing mcuh better.

[Inertia]

On November 8th 2006 Microsoft released Windows Vista the 6th Major release of the windows operating system to computer manufacturers globally. who at the time began offering it as an option on their computers alongside the 5 years mature Windows XP. Immediately Vista?s ?first impressions? began to destroy its reputation forever, by giving millions of people a horrible first experience.

Lack of affordable powerful hardware:

During this time RAM prices were higher than today and as a result a typical computer would be bought with 1gb of RAM, meaning that the increasingly popular budget computers were sold with just 512mb of RAM.

When windows Vista was designed Microsoft wanted to take advantage of the hardware accelerated graphics, and powerful components that were becoming more common in standard computers. However the budget computers of the time didn?t have these components.

As a result of its feature rich and innovative design Vista had become what many people would describe as bloaty, Windows XP is a much lighter operating system, it will run quite happily on just 512mb of RAM, where vista struggles even on 1gb of RAM and barley runs at all on 512mb. This alone isn?t a bad thing, and Microsoft are not to blame for innovating and looking to the future. However they should have set the minimum requirements to run the operating system much higher than they did.

So here is the first problem, the most commonly sold computers at the time which were bundled with Windows Vista were the cheaper ones which did not have nearly enough RAM or processing power, this caused millions of users worldwide great frustration, and all they could see to blame was ?that Vista?. Even the mid range ones didn?t run Vista to an impressive level, only the less popular high end expensive computers ran vista well, and even these had their problems?..

OEM Bundled Software

When OEM?s (Original Equipment Manufacturers) such as HP, Dell, Acer etc sell a pre configured laptop or desktop computer, they often bundle trials of paid software, or revenue generating software. Most commonly Mcafee Antivirus (30 or 90 day trial) Norton Antivirus (30 or 90 day Trial), Google Desktop and toolbar, Ask toolbar and many others. These applications aren?t just sat on the computer waiting to see if you want to use them , they are resident in your precious and sparse RAM as soon as your computer boots, grinding your already poorly performing brand new (in 2006) Vista computer to a halt. the incentive for the OEM?s is that if and when you activate that trial software into a paid subscription (which happens all to often) they get a cut of the sale. also because you are running google desktop and google toolbar, ask toolbar and possibly others, the OEM generates revenue from your searches. It does allow them to sell the computers cheaper, initially saving the end user money, which is attractive, but once again contributing to the end users poor Windows Vista experience.

Mis Educated Upgraders

In January 2007 Microsoft put Windows Vista and Windows Vista Upgrade retail boxes on the shelves worldwide, this caused a flurry of early adapters to go out and purchase Vista for their current machine running Windows XP. the minimum requirements for Windows Vista is an 800mhz CPU, 512mb of RAM and a 20gb Hard Drive. this is by Microsoft?s specification and is very low, whilst Windows XP would run fairly nimble on a machine of this specification, Vista would run at a crawl. some of these upgraders had 3-4 year old machines built in 2003 and they were going out buying Vista upgrade and installing it. they got a terrible experience of the OS and as it wasn?t cheap they made sure they told everyone just how poor Vista was, when realistically their view of the OS was jaded by their hardware limitations.

Bad Initial Driver Support

In 2006 a lot of hardware manufacturers weren?t interested in making their hardware work on Windows Vista (32 or 64 bit), and most of the ones that did only made a tiny effort to make them work, meaning the hardware functioned much better in XP than it did in vista. an example of this is the very popular Creative Labs Audigy2 Sound card. It is popular because of its brilliant sound quality compared with other cards, however for someone moving from XP to Vista this was nto the case. Creative took months to release any kind of driver at all, and when they eventually did it was very poor with crackly sound and none of the configurable features the XP driver had.

Initial Bugs

Unlike Windows XP (a derivative of 2000 and NT) the majority of Windows Vista was brand new, and brand new developed software will have glitches and bugs.

Extensive beta testing was carried out before the final release of Vista, but some little problems slipped through to damage its first impressions on users, and these users shouted about it.

The biggest problem in my opinion which could only be blamed on the OS itself was the file reading / writing speed bug. There was some kind of bottleneck which reduced the speed files were written to and read from discs massively. This effected how the whole machine ran, and made the OS feel bogged down, it meant copying files from one drive to another was a very long winded job. This bug was so prominent that people were replacing the file copy function of vista with third party software called Terracopy. You can read more about this here.

This bug was eventually fixed witha hot fix issued from Microsoft in March 2007, however this had to be manually installed, it was not automatically fixed until Service Pack 1 in February 2008, 16 months after vista reached the public.

Vista Today, The Conclusion

Windows Vista is over 3 years old, it is a mature operating system, well tested, well used and well patched. On March 5th 2009 Vista service Pack 2 was released, compared with the original RTM the OS is very stable, and if installed on modern hardware, even modern budget hardware which is much better than the budget hardware of 2006, then it runs quick and efficient. Hardware support is improved as manufacturers have found the time to develop good drivers.

However the damage is done. Vista?s reputation is ruined by its first 12-18 months of existance, being ran by miseducatedusers on poor hardware, being swamped with crapware by the OEM?s and having unpatched bugs for months on end has frustrated plenty of people and the outdated but unmovable opinion I hear every day is ?that Vista is a load of rubbish isnt it?

The more recent Windows 7 which is built on Vista seems to be having a better run, but then it has noneof the barriers Vista had, its built as an improvement on already mature software, and is released in a market with much more powerful hardware available cheaply, unfortunately the OEM crapware problem still does reard its ugly head quite often though.

http://www.yourlocalcomputerguy.co.uk/blog/

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

i love how no one remembers how crappy XP was when it was first released. people wouldnt leave their beloved Windows 98SE.

no one remembers all the threads about gaming on XP vs 98? OMG 98 IS SO MUCH FASTER FOR GAMING.

people hate vista today b/c theyre misinformed. "what do you mean i cant run vista on my machine i bought from HP in 2001?"

[still1]

I dont hate vista but its just i like windows 7 better.

[argonite]

Windows 7 is Windows Vista with a new image.

The vast majority of the changes (and damage) was done in Vista, in comparison Windows 7 is a very low-risk investment.

[Colin-uk Veteran]

the explorer interface changes in vista probly didnt help its popularity either.

the interface in 98/xp was largely similar so not many people had a problem with it because it didnt really change.

with vista there was the removal of the classic start menu and the toolbar with the buttons on it which i think were the major parts of the GUI the people missed.

now that people have gotten used to using the new explorer in vista they dont mind so much when upgrading to win 7 because its the same.

agreed on the points in the OP post too :p

[Chicane-UK Veteran]

I hated Vista because it launched with so many problems and was surrounded by a fanfare of BS. Many of you will no-doubt remeber when Halo 2 was going to be 'Vista' exclusive and one of the questions was "So why are Microsoft making Halo 2 only work on Vista and not XP?" and the answer was something completely unrelated and marketing-droid-ized to do with Vista bringing 'clarity to your world' - not actually answering the question.

Frankly that kind of stuff got my back up and I was so put off it, and had run into some big issues when I first tried it, I stayed well away and reccommended most folks that I knew to do the same.

[CuCumber]

i love how no one remembers how crappy XP was when it was first released.

people hate vista today b/c theyre misinformed.

Is it normal to you that an expensive OS is crappy when it's new? :x

[HawkMan]

Is it normal to you that an expensive OS is crappy when it's new? :x

Neither XP nor Vista was really crappy at launch, despite what the media wanted everyone to think.

[Dessimat0r]

Vista was fine for me, stable as a rock.

[Shadrack]

I dont hate vista but its just i like windows 7 better.

Yup! Couldn't have said it better myself.

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

Is it normal to you that an expensive OS is crappy when it's new? :x

the beta of Vista was crappy. I had Vista just a few months after launch and it was a solid OS. Then again, i wasnt using legacy hardware like the majority of people.

[Shadrack]

Is it normal to you that an expensive OS is crappy when it's new? :x

His statement had to do with Game performance and it was an issue when XP was released. Not because XP was crappy but because computer hardware was behind. Also, realize that games were designed for Windows 98 and XP was very different from 98.

[CuCumber]

Neither XP nor Vista was really crappy at launch, despite what the media wanted everyone to think.

Vista was almost unusable. I had it. Couldn't even copy files properly. Steve Ballmer's reality distortion field must've caused serious Stockholm syndrome in you.

[Shadrack]

the beta of Vista was crappy. I had Vista just a few months after launch and it was a solid OS. Then again, i wasnt using legacy hardware like the majority of people.

MS should not have released such a buggy public beta of Vista. The release was soo much better, but the reputation of Vista was more-or-less tainted in everyone's minds as a crappy experience because of the beta.

I would say part of the success of 7 (at least in terms of good reception) had to do with a good public beta.

[Inertia]

I dont hate vista but its just i like windows 7 better.

the explorer interface changes in vista probly didnt help its popularity either.

the interface in 98/xp was largely similar so not many people had a problem with it because it didnt really change.

with vista there was the removal of the classic start menu and the toolbar with the buttons on it which i think were the major parts of the GUI the people missed.

now that people have gotten used to using the new explorer in vista they dont mind so much when upgrading to win 7 because its the same.

agreed on the points in the OP post too :p

Good points and good additions, however, what I didnt state in the article, is that I wrote it from experiencing the hate coming from my clients and customers,, and not tech savy power users / sys admins / people who know how these things happen like most of the members on here :-)

[Shadrack]

Vista was almost unusable. I had it. Couldn't even copy files properly. Steve Ballmer's reality distortion field must've caused serious Stockholm syndrome in you.

That bug was patched shortly after release. It was available through Windows Update. Do you not install OS patches?

[TheTempestSonata]

They released ME... Why not a buggy public beta of Vista?

[HawkMan]

Vista was almost unusable. I had it. Couldn't even copy files properly. Steve Ballmer's reality distortion field must've caused serious Stockholm syndrome in you.

Wow, you managed to name one known file copu bug that was fixed, and affected a small selection of users.

I used vista partially from beta 2 and fully from RC/RTM. and it was a stable system, and I enevr had file copy issues and I gamed at nearly the same performance as XP or in some cases like BF2 actually slightly better performance.

the issues that where with Vista where from immature Graphics and Audio drivers. which in itself was fairly inexcusable since both Nvidia, Ati and Creative helped to make the new graphics and audio systems.

I like your argument of "You don't agree with me so somethign is wrong with you. because only my opinion is right, and I used vista for like 2 whole days"

That bug was patched shortly after release. It was available through Windows Update. Do you not install OS patches?

If you have seen his previous posts in other topics. No I don't think he does.

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

That summed it up well. (Y)

Fortunately for me, I only ran into a performance issue with Windows Vista on my old Pentium 4 PC. That soon changed when I installed Windows Vista on my gaming rig back in 2007.

[Frylock86]

OEM Bundled Software

When OEM’s (Original Equipment Manufacturers) such as HP, Dell, Acer etc sell a pre configured laptop or desktop computer, they often bundle trials of paid software, or revenue generating software. Most commonly Mcafee Antivirus (30 or 90 day trial) Norton Antivirus (30 or 90 day Trial), Google Desktop and toolbar, Ask toolbar and many others. These applications aren’t just sat on the computer waiting to see if you want to use them , they are resident in your precious and sparse RAM as soon as your computer boots, grinding your already poorly performing brand new (in 2006) Vista computer to a halt. the incentive for the OEM’s is that if and when you activate that trial software into a paid subscription (which happens all to often) they get a cut of the sale. also because you are running google desktop and google toolbar, ask toolbar and possibly others, the OEM generates revenue from your searches. It does allow them to sell the computers cheaper, initially saving the end user money, which is attractive, but once again contributing to the end users poor Windows Vista experience.

You know. This paragraph cannot be stressed enough.

Crapware does the PC image no good, If this garbage wasn't included with an OEM installation, I'm pretty sure the PC's image would be comparable with that of the Mac's.

Also to the file copy bug, install your updates! What kind of idiot doesn't install updates?

[CuCumber]

What kind of idiot doesn't install updates?

What kind of idiot accepts expensive buggy products? How fast you got a fix for "Not remembering folder view settings" bug? Thanks to people like you MS will do it again and again.

[Mr. Gibs]

What kind of idiot accepts expensive buggy products? How fast you got a fix for "Not remembering folder view settings" bug? Thanks to people like you MS will do it again and again.

I'm going to hazard a guess here, you have a mac. So all I can say here is, Snow Leopard. That should sum it up.

Also, programmers are human. There is no possible way for microsoft to test windows on every system out there. Even people with the exact same hardware will notice things sometimes run a bit differently on their respective computers.

So yes it had a file copy bug, but they fixed it shortly after the initial release.

[Guest xiphi]

What kind of idiot accepts expensive buggy products? How fast you got a fix for "Not remembering folder view settings" bug? Thanks to people like you MS will do it again and again.

So will Apple, Adobe, and any other company that produces products. What's your point?

[lee31]

What kind of idiot accepts expensive buggy products? How fast you got a fix for "Not remembering folder view settings" bug? Thanks to people like you MS will do it again and again.

That bug was fixed before Vista's official release therefore the only people it effected were those that got it free via a technet or msdn account or official beta testers they gave it to therefore your question is irrelevant.

[HawkMan]

What kind of idiot accepts expensive buggy products? How fast you got a fix for "Not remembering folder view settings" bug? Thanks to people like you MS will do it again and again.

Folder view settings wasn't actually a bug.