Vista will probably remain my favorite Windows OS ever. The amount of excitement I had to get it back in those days is unmatched. It's extremely underrated because it mostly ran on hardware that couldn't handle it at the time. When I got it on my first PC it ran like garbage, and I was very disappointed, but as soon as I got to experience it on good hardware, I absolutely loved it. I also miss aero glass so much.
Tried imitating Aero with Stardock Curtains, which's like a minimalistic alternative to WindowBlinds. Best I could do is simple semi-transparent title bars and borders. You could make the rest of the window semi-transparent and you'd get blurring for that, but you can't get blurring for the title bars and borders.
@@BeautifulAngelBlossom Do you have a figure on how many actual hard drives Vista directly killed? Also, were these those crappy Maxtor hard drives or works, the IBM deathstars?
The ecosystem not being ready was one of the issues with Vista. Hardware manufacturers weren’t all in, an a lot of sound cards, graphics cards, etc. did not have proper drivers for users at time of launch. Many branded computers too. Default drivers did what this could, but left users with a slow, buggy experience. However, Vista had its faults too, notably networking. Before the first service pack, file transfers over networks were essentially a no go. Opening a simple Excel document from a shared folder led to a time out error, more often than not. Service Packs really helped over time, but damage was done; especially with Macs becoming more popular thanks to iPods, iPhones and Intel processors…
Bloatware was a big problem as well. In the mid 2000s if you bought a new PC, it came loaded with so many trial programs that did things the operating system already did, and were difficult to remove. Less tech-savvy people wouldn't have even known to remove them. This considerably slowed down XP, but when OEMs added that garbage to Vista on hardware that barely met the minimum requirements, it was pretty much unusable.
I totally agree that the Vista visuals are beautiful. It's aged very well too. Still looks modern to me. Even Windows 11 feels like many steps back when it comes to visuals and animations compared to Vista. The 3D Win+Tab view is a work of art.
Vista (and thus Win7) really looked like a perfected version of the “sleek” look XP had. More modern Windows OSes are REALLY afraid of having colourful or “3D looking” buttons, everything is bland, flat colours.. just totally uninspiring.
That whole era was something to behold. Vista/7 were the best looking Windows versions out of the box, and (Snow) Leopard (which I believe came out soon after Vista) was definitely the best looking OS X version. Compiz was also up and coming in the Linux world as well, and that went all the way from tasteful, feature-rich accelerated desktop to wild wobbly window showcase. Everything nowadays feels so flat and sterile. From a usability perspective it's all fine-better in some ways-but meh. I miss the bold visuals.
Vista had a pretty beautiful interface which was a hundred times better than than the interface for Windows 8 and every version after that. I always enjoyed using it, could never understand the hate
Despite the rage, these were the golden moments of my life. I remember installing Vista, staying on top of the windows games, playing games, learning photoshop, Dreamweaver and what not. Pirating games. Oh the memories. Oh my gawd, Windows media centre. That thing was SooOOOo cool back in the day
The problem with UAC in Vista was a lot of programs written for XP would request administrator privileges every time they needed to do something, and then discard the handle to those privileges when they were done. As a worst case scenario, imagine a program copying some files to a restricted folder, and every time it finishes a file, it gives up its privileges, and has to ask for them again for the next one. The big issue with UAC was how legacy software interacted with the API, and how UAC handled these legacy programs. Not much actually had to happen in terms of "decreasing the sensitivitiy," UAC today is almost the same as it was in Vista.
You can blame third party software developers for not following Microsoft's guidelines. There is software TO THIS DAY that requires UAC to be off, we're talking a medical ERM system, I won't name names. It does require a domain with a windows server and active directory just to run it too, WITH UAC OFF.
I found the best solution to make the Vista UAC less annoying was to disable UAC-secure-Desktop, so that the UAC window is just a regular window without interrupting the work flow, just like every other "Do you want to save your changes"-Popup. It's a good hidden setting within gpedit tho, with Home Editions you needed to change the registry to achieve that. If there is some annoyance with any kind of software i always try to find a solution for it instead of just giving up on it on the spot, like so many people obviously did with Vista. And every Windows version always had some annoyances. XP had those yellow taskbar bubbles with sound, Windows 7 removed the option to use the classic context menu for applications on the task bar and also had no option to disable the mousehover-previews - and don't even get me started on Windows 8's war on the classic desktop. With Windows 8 the annoyances got too much for me personally, hence why i switched to a macOS and Linux co-existence. But up to that point all the specific annoyances of all Windows versions were manageable if you know where to find the right tweaks, Vista was no exception. People were simply too lazy to bother with that, but i can understand it somehow. No one wants the need to "tame" an operating system before it becomes usable, which is also why modern Windows is losing market share. Especially with the introduction of Windows 11 - in my opinion far more annoying and intrusive than default Vista ever was, just look at the shenanigans they do with their Edge-Browser.
The biggest problem with Vista was Microsoft telling OEMs that they were no longer allowed to sell XP, so lots of budget machines intended for XP were reused for Vista. It was common to buy a new Visa laptop with only 256 or 512MB RAM, which meant that Vista was constantly accessing the drive for virtual RAM. I remember installing Nero on someones new Vista laptop, and it taking over 40 minutes to complete. With the default security and UAC settings it took the first 20 mins just checking the files before asking if I wanted to let the installer do its job.
8:08 Although I do remember, that Windows 7 had in its release notes that it further put more load onto the GPU in rendering the Aero UI, so Vista as the first version to introduce it probably didn't yet do it most optimally.
That is correct. Vista introduced a new display driver model (WDDM). But it wasn't fully complete, and some parts of the classic UI acceleration were not GPU-accelerated yet, so they were rendered on the CPU. The GPU did all the compositing and the transparency effects and all that. Windows 7 added the UI acceleration back in, but in practice it didn't make much of a difference. The Aero UI never had to redraw UI elements the way XP and earlier versions had to, because Aero did the compositing on the GPU. So each window was drawn into a separate texture in memory, and the GPU would use hardware acceleration to draw them. XP and earlier literally drew the windows on top of eachother directly in memory, so only the topmost window's contents were preserved. This meant that when you dragged windows around, it had to redraw all the time, where Aero didn't have to do anything with the UI elements, as the textures weren't overwritten. Aside from that, the CPUs had become so fast that they drew the UI in software really quickly anyway. So yes, if you ran some 2D UI benchmark, you could measure that Windows 7 was faster because of the acceleration. But in daily use, you'd rarely notice the difference.
I think windows vista is the operating system equivalent of well aged wine, when it first came out it seemed pointless and worse than the prior system, but now, in today's age, when you crack open the bottle that is windows vista, you're met with a surprisingly wonderful experience.
@@DoomKid Except it didn't. Sure it had some optimizations, but I ran my Vista machine for as long as it lasted, with zero reason to switch to Win7. Plus Win7 did something with navigation that I took a long while to adjust to.
Vista served me well for many years, even with a rather underpowered PC. Still probably my favorite OS ever, really a huge shame it got ragged on so hard, it deserved so much better. :(
Back when I was a kid, we had a shared laptop with Vista on it, and I thought it was really cool. I never really understood why people hated it so much considering it worked just fine for me, but then again, it _was_ a pretty beefy laptop for the time, and if I remember correctly, we might have gotten it at a point where the driver situation had improved somewhat.
I recently installed Vista Ultimate on an old PC. I was curious about the OS since I had never really used it having gone from XP to 7. I think it's great! Gorgeous visuals and options that are no longer available. Too bad it has such a bad reputation as I truly enjoy this operating system. Great to see a positive review on this misunderstood and maligned version of Windows!
Totally agree,and I think Windows 8,although not pretty like Vista,got an undeserved bad reputation too.I still use Windows 8 on my second computer.I consider it to be fast and stable.
I have a soft spot for vista as it was my first OS on a laptop which was entirely my own, not a family PC. It always worked fine for me. The laptop came with vista pre-installed so it was built for it.
Never had any issues on my machine back in the day on day 1. You've pretty much said it already..The bad rep was from the poor driver support at the start, and people on less than ideal machines. By SP2 it was fine.
I kept selling Windows XP and probably only sold about a dozen Vista machines during it's lifetime (compared to hundreds of XP Machines). The way I saw it, the software was about 3 years ahead of where the Hardware was. It really needed a Dual Core with 4 or 8 Gigs of RAM and a dedicated graphics card to even be tolerable to run, and very few machines were sold with anything close to that power. The poor people who tried to run it with 1 GB of RAM were just out of luck.
I still have Vista Premium on an old Mesh laptop that originally came with XP. Obviously this isn't connected to the internet. It's used for compatibility with old hardware and software. I always loved the Aero glass interface. Translucency is something I always go for in Linux desktop environments. I never had the problems that I kept hearing others were having with it.
I quite liked Vista but I had a fairly modern PC, I seem to remember it used a lot of memory but the real negative was heavy disk usage, I think it was the superfetch service that kept cataloguing files all the time that really slowed things down but you could disable it but a lot of people just didn't know about it. This was really before SSDs were commonplace, I had two of those fancy Western Digital Raptor hard drives in RAID 0 at the time which made a huge difference.
I think using sleep mode is a more viable way to mitigate the slowdown caused by superfetch at a cold startup. Your comptuer running at full speed(ish) immediately, does not compare to the performance of a properly cached superfetch.
Windows Vista was great, in my opinion. I remember obsessing over the recommended specs, and purchasing a Toshiba laptop to meet those requirements before the launch. First day I could, I upgraded, going straight to ultimate edition. I was really big into windows customization using window blinds and shell replacements, but when Vista came out, Windows had finally become good enough on its own for me.
I remember my parents bought a prebuilt desktop with vista on launch and it didn’t have any of that drivers needed for it’s own network card for at least a month or two
I loved vista, I was running Dell workstation at the time, had a fuel boot between Vista and XP. Vista worked no issues and xp kept freezing. I remember vista needed a bios update or the license would expire after 30 days.
@Dan Woods Thanks a lot for mentioning Snappy Driver! I've got a Surface Pro engineering sample that has started to fall apart as far as functionality goes and no drivers to be found... Until now! Installing now and I hope my camera, Surface Pen, Windows Hello start working again!
Vista Home Premium was my first OS and in my first computer, an HP Pavilion Media Center m8200n. Loved that it had a TV tuner card too. It only came with 3GB of RAM and made windows' monthly updates very difficult but after many failed attempts and restarts the updates would eventually install and my gaming experience was usually very good. Definitely do miss the Aero Glass feature.
I had used Windows 98 then i got my own pc with a graphics card and xp ran like crap and was the worst ever for me Then i remember downloading vista and the whole journey from the start was awesome Vista ultimate is awesome, the aero, gadgets, graphics, stability, media, just was a great home pc os Win 7 was basic like win 95 Win 8 was just awefull and killed hdds Win 10 is actually good and stable except for the user tracking
I had a brand new pc that i got just around the time vista came out, so i had no problem running it from the beginning and i really enjoyed it actually... The only problem with it from jump that i had was my scanner driver not working on it, but that wasn't a major setback as i didn't use it all that much.
For me, I grew up with computers ever since I was 4. Since then, my first computer (which was a family computer) was a Windows Vista VAIO. It was my favourite thing I owned (or we owned) until my father accidentally dropped it in the middle of the night when he had important work to do - this was when Vista had lost support, around 2016 (yes we still used this computer in 2016). It worked perfectly fine on this hardware, we didn't get any issues. I still want to experience this Aero theme since it's so nostalgic. Me being lucky to be born in 2010, I am grateful for it.
I used Vista for years on a laptop that came with it preinstalled. It was nothing fancy: an Acer laptop with a pretty basic C2D CPU (the T5500 @1.66 Ghz) which cost like 700 (it was in the kind of range that would cost less than 600 bucks these days). 2GB RAM which I slightly upgraded to 3, but only a couple of years later. Discrete graphics, yes, but a barely 128 MB solution. Never gave me major headaches, and was indeed pretty good after SP1. The problem must have been of course Celeron laptops with the infamous intel GMA 9XX integrated graphics and similar crap and 1GB RAM (I even remember one or two models with Vista Basic and 512 MB!!) as well as even an HP VIA C7 CPU based NETBOOK!
Yeah, i remember upgrading to this and then having to turn back to xp because hardly any games ran, or crashing to desktop as no drivers was ready for that operating system! fun times.
I had an athlon XP for a loooong time. It was only fast enough for XP, and I upgraded in 2010 to a newer pc that ran Windows 7 (32 bit, since 2gb ram). Most people had a computer that was more of a Windows 98 computer with like 512mb ram....not good enough for vista!
I was a bit too young to have grown up with Windows XP, so instead most of my childhood was spent with Windows Vista. I have nothing but positive things to say about the OS! Likewise, I spent my early teens with a laptop that ran Windows 8.1, so I have positive experiences with that OS as well.
In my experience the reputation Vista earned for itself mostly comes from it having been bundled with the majority of netbooks and nettop systems which were very popular at the time. You could go back to WinXP but the driver situation for the latest hardware would make you loose some integrated peripherals like a webcam or WIFI adapter. And buying a USB-bussed counterpart would offset the system's initial low price and small size. Microsoft was just too persistent with stuffing Vista into everything that could barely run it.
I remember at the time switching directly from Windows XP to ...Mac OS. Only one version, no drivers hell, free updates, native Unix, better support for Asian fonts (I live in Japan), you name it. Getting back to Windows only now, mainly because of Apple's lack of Nvidia support.
As a x64bit O/S I found Vista a god send for my large scale digital paintings, finally I cound use more than 3.5GB RAM in the new ( at the time ) x64 bit Photoshop CS4. I never had a problem with it as the I build my own computers and alway make sure they are slightly ahead of the hardware curve. As you said the problem was marketing and manufactuers using Vista on specs that were way too low. A lot of consumers don't care about specs they just want a computer to work. IMO I think Vista was released too early, and yes Win7 was SP3, which worked very well as computers had caught up by then.
The two only things bad I remembered after upgrading from XP to Vista were: 1. PIO speed while copying files. Was fixed with SP1. 2. Some games (f.e. C&C Tiberium Wars) crashed on start. Only a fresh installation of the system fixed that. I HATE to do that and I wasn't able to play the game for ±1.5 years. It ran perfectly on XP before. In the end, it wasn't that bad imho - just too sophisticated for most of the hardware at the time. Jump from XP's requirements for a PC to Vists's was too big for that time.
I remember my PC died just days before Vista came out, so my mom got me another machine that came with Vista Home Premium out of the box and very well was capable of running it. Loved the experience despite what I have heard before but someday something went wrong - probably pubertary me catched some viruses - and it used way too many resources afterwards, making me want to go back to Windows XP or replace it with Linux. Neither method worked initially until I installed Ubuntu 8.04 through Wubi, after that I managed to install any OS to the harddrive if I wanted but I stuck with Ubuntu for the time being. Still, until this day Vista is the best looking Windows version and for certain the one next to XP that had the biggest impact on me.
Vista was ahead of its time for sure. I still remember being blown away by the gui back in late 2007 when my family bought a brand new dell inspiron desktop with vista on it. It felt so different and futuristic compared to xp and ran beautifully still one of my favorite OS. Vista walked so Windows 7 could run.
When i was a kid (about 7 or 9) i used 7 a lot. It was my mom's PC and all of us loved it because it didn't have any issues when we tried to do out schoolwork on it. Except the "other one", the Vista. That thing became the footstool of the household, earning the title "dinosaur computer" with just how awful it was to use. Most times i was forced to use it because the 7 would've been already taken by my brother. The experience was bad. Like, REALLY bad. Hell, the damn thing froze up so many times that one day when it occurred as usual, when my brother took out the battery to unfreeze it, it stuck on the manufacturers BIOS password. It's still stuck to this day. I hated Vista for years simply for that. But since I'm older now, looking back on it, it was so visually appealing and smooth with the capable hardware. Way more innovative than Windows 11 (11 looks so ugly to me). And i realized why it ran so bad; the PC's specs was 512mb ram, 32 bit. Literal potato! I dont think ill bother getting it up and running again with the security issues it has now, I'll just use a virtual machine for that. Amazing video by the way! People should know that Vista was a near masterpiece.
Great video! I ran Windows Vista from 2008 until...well, long after the EOL date. Starting off with service pack 1, and upgrading to SP2 when it came out, it was absolutely a stable and very useful operating system! I ran it on an Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 CPU, with 2gb of RAM like you. Overall was a great experience, enough so that I couldn't justify paying for the upgrade to Windows 7 when it came out; although in hindsight, upgrading would have been better, just to have a supported OS for longer.
@@WizardNumberNext I didn't mention Linux, but in 2008 I was dual-booting between Slackware Linux and Windows Vista. I don't think I mentioned that since it was the Windows Vista experience that was more relevant to this video. Still using Linux here, and actually using it a lot more now since it performs far, and I mean FAR, better on this older hardware. That was not-so-ironically one of the biggest complaints from Vista's early adopters.
I just reset the OS on my PC and forgot that it originally came with Vista, Once I got rid of the tiles and the funky start menu it's ok other than some current products like video drivers won't run on Vista.
I almost never had an opportunity to use Windows Vista on physical computer since my father, as far as I know, never liked upgrades. He bought a Vista laptop (Acer Aspire 5720z) somewhere in 2008 and he downgraded to XP as soon as he turned it on. The laptop had 2 GB RAM and Pentium processor (dual-core, not really sure which one) so I think it won't run Vista really bad (or maybe it would). He used XP until around 2016 and then decided to upgrade to 7 (by an advice of his brother who has been using Windows 7 for a long time), thus skipped Vista, and not long time after that he bought a new Windows 10 laptop, but decided to install 7 anyways. I used Vista only on a VM with pretty much same specs as his Acer laptop and it ran fine, without any big problems (but on a VM, so no wonder it worked that way)
Funnily enough, I have a 733MHz Pentium 3 with 256mb of ram, tried vista yesterday. Somehow seems more responsive than xp, and it can do aero due to the gpu being 7 years newer than everything else
I remember buying an LCD monitor at that time that actually had a “Vista Compatible” sticker on it. The hysteria was so out of control that people were afraid to buy even the most basic of peripherals out of fear of experiencing compatibility issues. Crazy.
Ah yes Vista Service Pack 2...that's what I had. I had no issues with Vista. Loved the gadgets on the side of the screen (always there and visible). I also loved the look of Aero Glass.
I've recently purchased a brand new sealed copy of the full (NOT upgrade, so it was expensive AF) Windows Vista Ultimate. I'm planning on doing an unboxing and have set up a partition aside to install it and after watching this video I seriously can't wait!
Vista was way ahead of it's time, requirements were steep and drivers weren't mature at all. By the second half of 2008, after SP1 and two performance updates, Vista became much better than XP, but Windows 7 was just around the corner....
I really liked how you justified Windows Vista's failure which many still do not understand that the hardware wasn't enough powerful. We are facing the same problem again with Windows 11 but it hasn't received so much criticism as Microsoft didn't allow unsupported hardware which was 3 yrs old or older to run it. I also really like the asthetics and the unique features like dreamscenes. I do admit that it's still buggy but no Windows is bugproof! By the way, at 9:32, it's actually doesn't support mp4 but instead wmv as all the default dreamscenes are in WMV and Vista doesn't support MP4 without additional codecs from what I have experienced. I really like Windows Vista and still use it today !
Well in my days I tried to find a Vista disk but I couldn't get one so I never had a chance to use it, so I upgraded from xp to 7 instead. Everything worked including the aero theme on 1gb ram and no gpu.
My experience with Vista was pretty much the same as yours. I adopted it early on as I wanted to develop with DirectX 10. Initially the OS had some issues with stability and performance, but the service packs pretty much cleaned it up. Other than that, drivers and applications weren't always mature enough (Vista was the first OS where applications were running without admin rights on standard consumer machines. Many applications were writing to parts of the filesystem or registry that only an admin could. They had to be updated to play by the Microsoft rules that had been around for ages). And yes, by the time Windows 7 came out, most people had powerful enough hardware, so that wasn't an issue. Drivers also weren't an issue anymore. And applications played nice when not running as admin, so that was solved as well. So Windows 7 was mostly clever marketing. People who didn't want to upgrade to Vista, would go to 7. But if you would have put them on Vista with all the updates, their experience would probably have been 99% the same.
I had Vista and it was absolutely fine! Especially after a few patches. Prior to that I also owned Windows ME and I never had any complaints about that either. Maybe I'm easily pleased!
Windows ME was absolute rubbish.. IIRC I bought a new machine that was ME certified and it was shockingly unstable... I upgraded to XP on the day it was released and it was a million times better... so much more stable, it "Just worked", even though it new. Dont recall any issue with drivers or anything (may be because it was relatively new hardware anyway).
I totally agree Windows 7 is Windows Mojave. I was the biggest Windows 7 fan, during its beta program. Then just before RTM I switched back to Vista for next few years and the main reason was performance. Let's say that contrary to common belief GUI performance of Windows 7 decreased compared to Vista. WDDM 1.1 drivers saved from 50MB to maybe at most 200MB in extreme cases of system memory at the expense of severly impacting drawing performance and keeping some junk in video ram even when I had tons of RAM (Vista didn't cling to content in video RAM like Win7 did because it always had copy in system RAM). Where it came to it: benchmarks favored Vista SP2. I mean game benchmarks and GUI benchmarks. Only benchmarks which rely heavily on disk performance didn't but this was due to two things: 1. background services didn't really wait until user was away and tried to squeeze activity while user him/herself was active leading to latency issues. 2. Vista was configured for file system resiliency. In other words if there was power failure Vista's way it did write operation in file system would lead to less issues. Win7 by default was configured more like XP so potentially less safe but faster, especially when writing a lot of small files. Back to benchmarks I rememeber typical comment of reviewer was "Surprisingly Vista SP2 is marginally faster than Windows 7. In time as programs are written for newest Microsoft operating system this trend will surely change..." and then go back to notion that Windows 7 is the faster OS even if all the benchmarks just proved otherwise. Personally I had to drop Vista as AMD dropped support for this OS. Over the years Microsoft made this OS obsolete with dropping support for it in Visual Studio compilers so today a lot of programs won't work on it. In fact its compatibility isn't any better than XP. Windows 7 can be however used instead for Aero experience.
Excellent video. I used Vista for a year in 2009 and liked it quite a bit, but Windows 7 was just a better, more functional version of Vista with slightly better performance. Was there any reason to use Vista once 7 came out? They’re SO similar
the first laptop I ever owned ran windows Vista and I never had any issues with it. I ran Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 on there as well as a couple of music production programs. That Aero theme was real cool to look at for sure but there was a load of custom themes on DeviantArt that I loved to mess around with. I wish that sort of thing were possible on Windows 10 and 11.
Back in the day I purchased a dell inspiron 518 that came with Vista it has a intel core 2 quad with 8 gb memory and a 500 gb hdd it also has a add innvideo card. I'd say I loved Vista it ran perfectly in that computer. Actually, to this day, I still have that computer. It now has Windows 10 of course. I still have the factory restor disks, though. I no longer use that old computer I upgraded to a newer machine dell still works after all these years. It ran Vista, then 7, then a free upgrad win 10, then shortly after the win 10 upgrad in 2016, I upgraded to a newer machine.
Thanks for this Dan. I ran Vista with no problems but I did have a pretty high end PC at the time so perhaps my experience was different to most people. Windows 7 was one of my favorite PC O/S's and it was mostly a refined version of Vista so they were on the right track, its just Vista was Toxic at that point so needed a rebrand
After Amiga OS Vista was the first OS I really liked. It ran rock stable, fast and beautiful, Aero Glass was amazing and Defender warned you if nasty root kit like DRM's like SecuROM or StarForce infiltrated your system and gave the option to block it from startup. Things I'd like to have today instead of ugly duck Win 10, 11... Great video, thank you very much!
Windows vista was ahead of almost every machine at that time, that was the problem. Actually, from my opinion, is the best looking and cool windows, ever created.
I hated trying to navigate around things like the control panel in Vista. Parts of it had a new skin while others didn't, and settings were harder to find. Windows 7 made some of this easier, but it had some of the old UI quirks where you'd pop into a setting and get presented with the old XP UI. I also remember the hardware requirements were a bit of an issue. My father owns a Dell that shipped with Vista and ran like crap. We put XP on it, and it's still running like a champ (in 2022). So, I wasn't a fan of Vista. But I liked ME. I guess that makes me weird 🙂
I still have Vista on my Laptop I don’t ever remember it giving me any trouble. I did boost my ram. I still have room for more RAM but it does seem to need more. I did music for jukeboxes on it and simple graphics.
It was DEFINITELY the worst windows OS I had used, by a long shot, and this worst list includes the hideous windows 8 as well. Vista was extremely sluggish, naggy with the system user warnings, incompatible with most of my software, and incompatible with many devices. Vista is the reason behind the extended license for netbooks of the era to come with XP instead, since vista was too sluggish. My newly bought laptop was unbearably slow and in a couple of days, I wiped the hell out of it, and installed a fresh xp on it, which made it 5x faster! Similarly, in the military, and as a nerd, I was tasked to wipe out a few of the vista pcs in the battalion.
You could try giving syphilis a second chance, but I would not recommend it. Wait, wasn't it Vista that made people's urination painful? Seriously, though, I tried to fix problems on many people's Vista machines. I only saw one Vista machine which wasn't extremely slow. That one had 6G of RAM installed, which was a very large amount at the time.
I had Vista on a Dell Inspiron laptop back then, had a core 2 duo. I remember it only came with 4GB of ram and it could be a bit sluggish at times, so I got another stick which helped a bit. Honestly most of it I think had to do with Hard Drives of the time. SSD would run blazing fast. I do remember using it on other peoples computer's and it being almost unusable, but it was because they were on the old service pack or something. I know I fixed it. The transition from Vista to 7 for me wasn't a huge difference. The Vista laptop crapped on the old pentium XP desktop I had. Also, a lot of people back then did have under performing hardware. Laptops especially. It wasn't really until after the core 2 era that we started getting adequate hardware for their operating systems. A lot of PC's back then didn't even have 4GB of ram.
Funny thing, I'm just in the process of decommissioning an old Vista system that I built when Vista was new and have used continually since then, initially as my main system and later running some legacy stuff I didn't want cluttering newer systems. Over the years I've disabled a few functions for security reasons but overall it's been a pretty pleasant and stable experience without major issues and I actually prefer the look and feel over Win10.
Vista was the most misunderstood Windows version ever. It wasn't meant as an upgrade for old systems, but was a properly new OS for brand new systems. My first Vista system had a dual core CPU, 4GB RAM, RAID0 drive setup, and powerful graphics. Vista was fast, slick and stable. It felt like a definite upgrade over XP. Would it be an "upgrade" on an old system? Of course not. I've personally never seen getting a more modern OS for hardware I've been using for a while as an "upgrade". A new OS is something you get for your shiny new hardware. And if you did it that way, Vista was great.
Vista looked good, the only trouble is there was some kind of issue where the second child window to an application main window when opened meant you couldn't move the main window as it wouldn't let you. I think Windows 7 fixed this. This alone was reason to either patch it (not sure if it was) or just go on to 7 as soon as it was released. If it wasn't for that there might not have been too much difference between the two. But I certainly would not use Vista at all simply for the fact Windows 7 came out. Luckily I don't use either now as I am on Linux :D
I agree with you. Vista was a mess when it came out because of the demanding hardware requirements most people couldn't meet. By the end of it's days it was actually pretty stable and certainly usable. I did some computer training for older people with Vista machines back in 2016 (because of licencing) and it worked as smooth as Windows 7.
Vista laid the foundation for many features we now associate with win 7. The new audio system was a really needed upgrade but companies are just lazy and their lazyness caused problems. Also new driver model for everything else.
My first experience with Vista was with RC1 that came with a computer's magazine in Summer of 2006. I wondered what was that and it was a early stage of Vista before RTM. I had a new pc short after Summer 2006 but the specs weren't great... pentium 4 531 at 3.0ghz, single 512mb ddr 400, nvidia geforce 6200 256mb vram, 160gb sata hdd from maxtor (this hdd had amnesia for sometime, firmware issue). When I installed RC1, it was beautiful and painfully slow. The computer's magazine made a dvd menthly available with fresh drivers and kept installing vista/xp alternatelly. I got bored of always doing this and kept using xp until I got a copy of pirated vista plus activation. The RC1 copy came with a cd-key and I was able to activate with that key by phoning MS center and noted the numbers on a paper for a late use, it would work as long as the hardware never changed. Vista was fine for me but I had no capable hardware and software made for xp didn't run that well.
I remember getting a OEM disc from a friends to reinstall on his moms computer, and was just inlove with the holographic disc like windows xp. I miss physical media....
When I used Vista, it ran hard and fast, even on lower-end hardware. In fact, I may see about using my older rig once I get set up with my upgrade. I know talking heads are screaming "security risks" but DAMNIT it ran faster than 7!
Was not expecting a video from you tonight, luckily I have a cold beer in my hand....you know where this is going by now.... Downloading your vid as I write this. 🤘😎👍
People only give Vista a bad rep because they were old enough to remember when it sucked. Windows 98 boomers like me remember the XP experience sucking ass, because of shit like the Windows Update bug that gave everyone a huge virus that couldn't be removed easily, and compatibility issues that weren't resolved until years of service packs and updates. Everyone loves XP because they grew up with it as a kid, though. Not Vista. Give it a few years and Vista will become the underdog, and get a shitton of people who *also* grew up with it giving it lots of praise and recognition, both of which I feel it deserves. Vista pioneered what we take for granted in Windows today, with things like the mobility center, network and sharing center, window transparency, snap-to features (which would be built upon by 7 and later expanded by 11.), better user security, and so on.
I find it very sad, that so many people hate windows vista just out of trend. I always liked it because it made the "modern" windows and it looked absolutely beautifully. Its just sad, that many people who say its really bad, actually never used it.
Windows 2000 were my favorite Windows ever. In fact so reliable i only rebooted PC 1 time every 6 months for fun. Around year 2010 or so, Microsoft themselves said Win 2000 were their most reliable Windows.
OMG I loved these DreamScene Content's 🤩 I recently installed Windows Vista Ultimate Pack and i only got one DreamScene Content. If you have an archive of these or know where can i find these please give me a link. (English is not my first language sorry)
I actually had great memories with Vista. My Vista Laptop I bought in 2007 was my go to Laptop until 2013 before the Hard Drive failed on me. I loved Vista back then and love it today IMO It's still the most beautiful OS yet besides Windows 95/98.
Windows Vista, like a lot of operating systems, was dependent on the hardware to run well. If you had great hardware that could deal with the bloat, it was fine. You could also cut the bloat by turning off a lot of the added / useless features that were not a value add.
Speeding up loading anything from mass storage by caching it on USB drive? Back in 2006 I have had 320gb and 500gb HDDs, which already were faster then any USB 2.0 pendrive would ever be (there is around 50mb/s speed limit, as rest is consumed by USB overhead, Windows never got above 40mb/s on usb 2.0). My drives were close to 100mb/s and probably even faster but my controller was limiting factor (66mb/s in 2006). Trying to cache faster HDD on slower more complex device was terrible idea.
I missed the early hassle of Windows Vista and switched from XP to Vista when SP1 came out. Have only fond memories of that OS. :) Something shady is going on with SDI, my virus scanner didn´t allow the download. Seems like a new company took over the recent versions and maybe that tool is no longer safe to use. I found Snappy Driver Installer Origin, a fork of an earlier version, that is maintained by another person.
i have always said and will always say that vista was not as bad as everyone said it was. it was simply too ahead of its time. compared to windows releases now (cough cough, *11*) where its just a surface level ui makeover with a couple gimmicks and more bloatware, vista actually innovated a shit ton. it introduced so many features that are staples of modern windows like the search, uac, defender, etc. some of its ui is still present in windows 11 to this day (not sure whether this is a testament to how good vista was or how lazy microsoft is). also the aero glass theme was absolutely beautiful and the decision to scrap it in favor of flat oversimplified garbage in windows 8 was so stupid. windows 7 being a more refined version of vista makes windows 7 my favorite os of all time
Vista will probably remain my favorite Windows OS ever. The amount of excitement I had to get it back in those days is unmatched. It's extremely underrated because it mostly ran on hardware that couldn't handle it at the time. When I got it on my first PC it ran like garbage, and I was very disappointed, but as soon as I got to experience it on good hardware, I absolutely loved it. I also miss aero glass so much.
We need Aero Glass back!
Tried imitating Aero with Stardock Curtains, which's like a minimalistic alternative to WindowBlinds. Best I could do is simple semi-transparent title bars and borders. You could make the rest of the window semi-transparent and you'd get blurring for that, but you can't get blurring for the title bars and borders.
Visata kept me in bussines as free lance computer tech that OS would eat hard drives cause it Ran them all time these was brand new PCS too
@@BeautifulAngelBlossom Do you have a figure on how many actual hard drives Vista directly killed? Also, were these those crappy Maxtor hard drives or works, the IBM deathstars?
Run aero10
The ecosystem not being ready was one of the issues with Vista. Hardware manufacturers weren’t all in, an a lot of sound cards, graphics cards, etc. did not have proper drivers for users at time of launch. Many branded computers too. Default drivers did what this could, but left users with a slow, buggy experience. However, Vista had its faults too, notably networking. Before the first service pack, file transfers over networks were essentially a no go. Opening a simple Excel document from a shared folder led to a time out error, more often than not. Service Packs really helped over time, but damage was done; especially with Macs becoming more popular thanks to iPods, iPhones and Intel processors…
The thing that really fixed Vista was disabling the sidebar and restarting. The sidebar had a memory leak that caused the poor performance
Bloatware was a big problem as well. In the mid 2000s if you bought a new PC, it came loaded with so many trial programs that did things the operating system already did, and were difficult to remove. Less tech-savvy people wouldn't have even known to remove them. This considerably slowed down XP, but when OEMs added that garbage to Vista on hardware that barely met the minimum requirements, it was pretty much unusable.
I totally agree that the Vista visuals are beautiful. It's aged very well too. Still looks modern to me. Even Windows 11 feels like many steps back when it comes to visuals and animations compared to Vista. The 3D Win+Tab view is a work of art.
Vista (and thus Win7) really looked like a perfected version of the “sleek” look XP had. More modern Windows OSes are REALLY afraid of having colourful or “3D looking” buttons, everything is bland, flat colours.. just totally uninspiring.
That whole era was something to behold. Vista/7 were the best looking Windows versions out of the box, and (Snow) Leopard (which I believe came out soon after Vista) was definitely the best looking OS X version. Compiz was also up and coming in the Linux world as well, and that went all the way from tasteful, feature-rich accelerated desktop to wild wobbly window showcase.
Everything nowadays feels so flat and sterile. From a usability perspective it's all fine-better in some ways-but meh. I miss the bold visuals.
Vista had a pretty beautiful interface which was a hundred times better than than the interface for Windows 8 and every version after that. I always enjoyed using it, could never understand the hate
i fucking hate the windows 8/ UI … Vista and 7 looked even much frendlier
@@misatosfootpic 💯
Despite the rage, these were the golden moments of my life. I remember installing Vista, staying on top of the windows games, playing games, learning photoshop, Dreamweaver and what not. Pirating games. Oh the memories.
Oh my gawd, Windows media centre. That thing was SooOOOo cool back in the day
The problem with UAC in Vista was a lot of programs written for XP would request administrator privileges every time they needed to do something, and then discard the handle to those privileges when they were done. As a worst case scenario, imagine a program copying some files to a restricted folder, and every time it finishes a file, it gives up its privileges, and has to ask for them again for the next one. The big issue with UAC was how legacy software interacted with the API, and how UAC handled these legacy programs. Not much actually had to happen in terms of "decreasing the sensitivitiy," UAC today is almost the same as it was in Vista.
You can blame third party software developers for not following Microsoft's guidelines. There is software TO THIS DAY that requires UAC to be off, we're talking a medical ERM system, I won't name names. It does require a domain with a windows server and active directory just to run it too, WITH UAC OFF.
I found the best solution to make the Vista UAC less annoying was to disable UAC-secure-Desktop, so that the UAC window is just a regular window without interrupting the work flow, just like every other "Do you want to save your changes"-Popup. It's a good hidden setting within gpedit tho, with Home Editions you needed to change the registry to achieve that.
If there is some annoyance with any kind of software i always try to find a solution for it instead of just giving up on it on the spot, like so many people obviously did with Vista. And every Windows version always had some annoyances.
XP had those yellow taskbar bubbles with sound, Windows 7 removed the option to use the classic context menu for applications on the task bar and also had no option to disable the mousehover-previews - and don't even get me started on Windows 8's war on the classic desktop. With Windows 8 the annoyances got too much for me personally, hence why i switched to a macOS and Linux co-existence.
But up to that point all the specific annoyances of all Windows versions were manageable if you know where to find the right tweaks, Vista was no exception. People were simply too lazy to bother with that, but i can understand it somehow.
No one wants the need to "tame" an operating system before it becomes usable, which is also why modern Windows is losing market share. Especially with the introduction of Windows 11 - in my opinion far more annoying and intrusive than default Vista ever was, just look at the shenanigans they do with their Edge-Browser.
The biggest problem with Vista was Microsoft telling OEMs that they were no longer allowed to sell XP, so lots of budget machines intended for XP were reused for Vista.
It was common to buy a new Visa laptop with only 256 or 512MB RAM, which meant that Vista was constantly accessing the drive for virtual RAM.
I remember installing Nero on someones new Vista laptop, and it taking over 40 minutes to complete.
With the default security and UAC settings it took the first 20 mins just checking the files before asking if I wanted to let the installer do its job.
8:08 Although I do remember, that Windows 7 had in its release notes that it further put more load onto the GPU in rendering the Aero UI, so Vista as the first version to introduce it probably didn't yet do it most optimally.
That is correct. Vista introduced a new display driver model (WDDM). But it wasn't fully complete, and some parts of the classic UI acceleration were not GPU-accelerated yet, so they were rendered on the CPU. The GPU did all the compositing and the transparency effects and all that.
Windows 7 added the UI acceleration back in, but in practice it didn't make much of a difference. The Aero UI never had to redraw UI elements the way XP and earlier versions had to, because Aero did the compositing on the GPU. So each window was drawn into a separate texture in memory, and the GPU would use hardware acceleration to draw them.
XP and earlier literally drew the windows on top of eachother directly in memory, so only the topmost window's contents were preserved. This meant that when you dragged windows around, it had to redraw all the time, where Aero didn't have to do anything with the UI elements, as the textures weren't overwritten.
Aside from that, the CPUs had become so fast that they drew the UI in software really quickly anyway.
So yes, if you ran some 2D UI benchmark, you could measure that Windows 7 was faster because of the acceleration. But in daily use, you'd rarely notice the difference.
I think windows vista is the operating system equivalent of well aged wine, when it first came out it seemed pointless and worse than the prior system, but now, in today's age, when you crack open the bottle that is windows vista, you're met with a surprisingly wonderful experience.
I loved Vista. It was such a big evolution of Windows I have never seen before and never seen again.
👍
Win 7 just perfected it though, pretty much made Vista obsolete the day it was released.
@@DoomKid Except it didn't. Sure it had some optimizations, but I ran my Vista machine for as long as it lasted, with zero reason to switch to Win7. Plus Win7 did something with navigation that I took a long while to adjust to.
I'd argue that the upgrade from Windows 3.1x to 95, or from Windows 9x to XP was a more significant evolution than XP to Vista.
Stay delusional
I just remember that it was very resource-hungry compared to XP. Even with 4 GB of ram everything(games) seemed to run worse.
"everything (games)"
Yep! It looked great and had some great features. But even on my gaming beast (I had disposable income back then) it ran... Not great.
@@wordart_guian yes that's the real purpose of computers, for games!
even windows 11 runs ok on 3gb ram. windows vista was truly an unoptimized piece of garbage.
@@dolbyprologicii do you seriously believe 11 on 3gb runs better than vista on 2?
Vista on 2gb ran comparably to 10 on 8gb.
Vista served me well for many years, even with a rather underpowered PC. Still probably my favorite OS ever, really a huge shame it got ragged on so hard, it deserved so much better. :(
Back when I was a kid, we had a shared laptop with Vista on it, and I thought it was really cool. I never really understood why people hated it so much considering it worked just fine for me, but then again, it _was_ a pretty beefy laptop for the time, and if I remember correctly, we might have gotten it at a point where the driver situation had improved somewhat.
I recently installed Vista Ultimate on an old PC. I was curious about the OS since I had never really used it having gone from XP to 7. I think it's great! Gorgeous visuals and options that are no longer available. Too bad it has such a bad reputation as I truly enjoy this operating system. Great to see a positive review on this misunderstood and maligned version of Windows!
Totally agree,and I think Windows 8,although not pretty like Vista,got an undeserved bad reputation too.I still use Windows 8 on my second computer.I consider it to be fast and stable.
@@davidr.wilson8194 Windows 8/8.1 is pretty light for old computers not gonna lie.
I have a soft spot for vista as it was my first OS on a laptop which was entirely my own, not a family PC. It always worked fine for me. The laptop came with vista pre-installed so it was built for it.
Never had any issues on my machine back in the day on day 1. You've pretty much said it already..The bad rep was from the poor driver support at the start, and people on less than ideal machines. By SP2 it was fine.
I kept selling Windows XP and probably only sold about a dozen Vista machines during it's lifetime (compared to hundreds of XP Machines).
The way I saw it, the software was about 3 years ahead of where the Hardware was. It really needed a Dual Core with 4 or 8 Gigs of RAM and a dedicated graphics card to even be tolerable to run, and very few machines were sold with anything close to that power.
The poor people who tried to run it with 1 GB of RAM were just out of luck.
I still have Vista Premium on an old Mesh laptop that originally came with XP. Obviously this isn't connected to the internet. It's used for compatibility with old hardware and software. I always loved the Aero glass interface. Translucency is something I always go for in Linux desktop environments. I never had the problems that I kept hearing others were having with it.
I quite liked Vista but I had a fairly modern PC, I seem to remember it used a lot of memory but the real negative was heavy disk usage, I think it was the superfetch service that kept cataloguing files all the time that really slowed things down but you could disable it but a lot of people just didn't know about it. This was really before SSDs were commonplace, I had two of those fancy Western Digital Raptor hard drives in RAID 0 at the time which made a huge difference.
Those raptors with a huge heat sink were the ones to get. The noise of 2 of those spinning up at startup and loading windows can never be replicated.
I had the raptor drives to, into raid 0, it works great
I think using sleep mode is a more viable way to mitigate the slowdown caused by superfetch at a cold startup. Your comptuer running at full speed(ish) immediately, does not compare to the performance of a properly cached superfetch.
Windows Vista was great, in my opinion. I remember obsessing over the recommended specs, and purchasing a Toshiba laptop to meet those requirements before the launch. First day I could, I upgraded, going straight to ultimate edition. I was really big into windows customization using window blinds and shell replacements, but when Vista came out, Windows had finally become good enough on its own for me.
I remember my parents bought a prebuilt desktop with vista on launch and it didn’t have any of that drivers needed for it’s own network card for at least a month or two
Now do Windows 8.1, my personal favorite due to performance and lack of spyware compared to 10 and 11.
telemetry reporting was introduced into 8.1 a long ago
u need 10 ltsc
@@tribemaster101 I myself use that
Windows 10 and 11 don't have Spyware
@@nneeerrrd they added that telemety in Windows 7 too
I loved vista, I was running Dell workstation at the time, had a fuel boot between Vista and XP. Vista worked no issues and xp kept freezing.
I remember vista needed a bios update or the license would expire after 30 days.
@Dan Woods Thanks a lot for mentioning Snappy Driver! I've got a Surface Pro engineering sample that has started to fall apart as far as functionality goes and no drivers to be found... Until now! Installing now and I hope my camera, Surface Pen, Windows Hello start working again!
Vista Home Premium was my first OS and in my first computer, an HP Pavilion Media Center m8200n. Loved that it had a TV tuner card too. It only came with 3GB of RAM and made windows' monthly updates very difficult but after many failed attempts and restarts the updates would eventually install and my gaming experience was usually very good. Definitely do miss the Aero Glass feature.
I actually had more problems with Win XP than with Vista. Ran smooth like butter for me.
Same. I got XP to bluescreen multiple times, but can't actually remember if that happened ever on Vista 🤔
@Ed Straker To a point fair statement there. Though in my opinion XP began to got stable just around SP2.
I had used Windows 98 then i got my own pc with a graphics card and xp ran like crap and was the worst ever for me
Then i remember downloading vista and the whole journey from the start was awesome
Vista ultimate is awesome, the aero, gadgets, graphics, stability, media, just was a great home pc os
Win 7 was basic like win 95
Win 8 was just awefull and killed hdds
Win 10 is actually good and stable except for the user tracking
Vista Ultimate had a lot of experimental features that I always wished Microsoft kept. I’m using gadgets and dreamscene even on Windows 11.
If you like Windows DreamScene, try Wallpaper Engine.
@@ebridgewater Cool thanks! I got around most of the quirks of dreamscne. I use ramdisk to store the video file and no compression.
I too love the glass aesthetic and I really liked the sidebar as well. I remember being disappointed when they stopped supporting it.
Actually, a lot of Features in Windows 8, 10, and 11 are built-in features from Windows 7 and Vista.
I'm amazed this has only 7000 views. It definitely needs more.
I had a brand new pc that i got just around the time vista came out, so i had no problem running it from the beginning and i really enjoyed it actually... The only problem with it from jump that i had was my scanner driver not working on it, but that wasn't a major setback as i didn't use it all that much.
For me, I grew up with computers ever since I was 4. Since then, my first computer (which was a family computer) was a Windows Vista VAIO. It was my favourite thing I owned (or we owned) until my father accidentally dropped it in the middle of the night when he had important work to do - this was when Vista had lost support, around 2016 (yes we still used this computer in 2016). It worked perfectly fine on this hardware, we didn't get any issues. I still want to experience this Aero theme since it's so nostalgic. Me being lucky to be born in 2010, I am grateful for it.
Jeez with all the flat and simple UI we have today, vista looks fancy… It could be an upgrade to what we have now
You mean you don’t love the flat, bland, boring look of Win10 onwards? lol
I used Vista for years on a laptop that came with it preinstalled. It was nothing fancy: an Acer laptop with a pretty basic C2D CPU (the T5500 @1.66 Ghz) which cost like 700 (it was in the kind of range that would cost less than 600 bucks these days). 2GB RAM which I slightly upgraded to 3, but only a couple of years later. Discrete graphics, yes, but a barely 128 MB solution. Never gave me major headaches, and was indeed pretty good after SP1. The problem must have been of course Celeron laptops with the infamous intel GMA 9XX integrated graphics and similar crap and 1GB RAM (I even remember one or two models with Vista Basic and 512 MB!!) as well as even an HP VIA C7 CPU based NETBOOK!
Yeah, i remember upgrading to this and then having to turn back to xp because hardly any games ran, or crashing to desktop as no drivers was ready for that operating system! fun times.
I had an athlon XP for a loooong time. It was only fast enough for XP, and I upgraded in 2010 to a newer pc that ran Windows 7 (32 bit, since 2gb ram). Most people had a computer that was more of a Windows 98 computer with like 512mb ram....not good enough for vista!
Windows Vista user interface is better than anything Microsoft came up with after windows 7.
I was a bit too young to have grown up with Windows XP, so instead most of my childhood was spent with Windows Vista. I have nothing but positive things to say about the OS! Likewise, I spent my early teens with a laptop that ran Windows 8.1, so I have positive experiences with that OS as well.
In my experience the reputation Vista earned for itself mostly comes from it having been bundled with the majority of netbooks and nettop systems which were very popular at the time. You could go back to WinXP but the driver situation for the latest hardware would make you loose some integrated peripherals like a webcam or WIFI adapter. And buying a USB-bussed counterpart would offset the system's initial low price and small size.
Microsoft was just too persistent with stuffing Vista into everything that could barely run it.
I remember at the time switching directly from Windows XP to ...Mac OS. Only one version, no drivers hell, free updates, native Unix, better support for Asian fonts (I live in Japan), you name it.
Getting back to Windows only now, mainly because of Apple's lack of Nvidia support.
As a x64bit O/S I found Vista a god send for my large scale digital paintings, finally I cound use more than 3.5GB RAM in the new ( at the time ) x64 bit Photoshop CS4. I never had a problem with it as the I build my own computers and alway make sure they are slightly ahead of the hardware curve. As you said the problem was marketing and manufactuers using Vista on specs that were way too low. A lot of consumers don't care about specs they just want a computer to work. IMO I think Vista was released too early, and yes Win7 was SP3, which worked very well as computers had caught up by then.
Running Photoshop x64 on a system vastly superior to macos....in 2007....that's a win
The two only things bad I remembered after upgrading from XP to Vista were:
1. PIO speed while copying files. Was fixed with SP1.
2. Some games (f.e. C&C Tiberium Wars) crashed on start. Only a fresh installation of the system fixed that. I HATE to do that and I wasn't able to play the game for ±1.5 years. It ran perfectly on XP before.
In the end, it wasn't that bad imho - just too sophisticated for most of the hardware at the time. Jump from XP's requirements for a PC to Vists's was too big for that time.
I remember my PC died just days before Vista came out, so my mom got me another machine that came with Vista Home Premium out of the box and very well was capable of running it.
Loved the experience despite what I have heard before but someday something went wrong - probably pubertary me catched some viruses - and it used way too many resources afterwards, making me want to go back to Windows XP or replace it with Linux.
Neither method worked initially until I installed Ubuntu 8.04 through Wubi, after that I managed to install any OS to the harddrive if I wanted but I stuck with Ubuntu for the time being.
Still, until this day Vista is the best looking Windows version and for certain the one next to XP that had the biggest impact on me.
Vista was ahead of its time for sure. I still remember being blown away by the gui back in late 2007 when my family bought a brand new dell inspiron desktop with vista on it. It felt so different and futuristic compared to xp and ran beautifully still one of my favorite OS. Vista walked so Windows 7 could run.
'We're going to die'... Classic Moss. Thanks for another great video and taking one for the team Dan.
When i was a kid (about 7 or 9) i used 7 a lot. It was my mom's PC and all of us loved it because it didn't have any issues when we tried to do out schoolwork on it. Except the "other one", the Vista. That thing became the footstool of the household, earning the title "dinosaur computer" with just how awful it was to use. Most times i was forced to use it because the 7 would've been already taken by my brother. The experience was bad. Like, REALLY bad. Hell, the damn thing froze up so many times that one day when it occurred as usual, when my brother took out the battery to unfreeze it, it stuck on the manufacturers BIOS password. It's still stuck to this day. I hated Vista for years simply for that.
But since I'm older now, looking back on it, it was so visually appealing and smooth with the capable hardware. Way more innovative than Windows 11 (11 looks so ugly to me). And i realized why it ran so bad; the PC's specs was 512mb ram, 32 bit. Literal potato! I dont think ill bother getting it up and running again with the security issues it has now, I'll just use a virtual machine for that. Amazing video by the way! People should know that Vista was a near masterpiece.
Great video!
I ran Windows Vista from 2008 until...well, long after the EOL date. Starting off with service pack 1, and upgrading to SP2 when it came out, it was absolutely a stable and very useful operating system!
I ran it on an Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 CPU, with 2gb of RAM like you.
Overall was a great experience, enough so that I couldn't justify paying for the upgrade to Windows 7 when it came out; although in hindsight, upgrading would have been better, just to have a supported OS for longer.
Back in 2008 I was using Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Etch, which was doing all this and much more.
@@WizardNumberNext I didn't mention Linux, but in 2008 I was dual-booting between Slackware Linux and Windows Vista. I don't think I mentioned that since it was the Windows Vista experience that was more relevant to this video.
Still using Linux here, and actually using it a lot more now since it performs far, and I mean FAR, better on this older hardware. That was not-so-ironically one of the biggest complaints from Vista's early adopters.
I just reset the OS on my PC and forgot that it originally came with Vista, Once I got rid of the tiles and the funky start menu it's ok other than some current products like video drivers won't run on Vista.
My dad had Vista on his old laptop, and he never had any technical issues.
I almost never had an opportunity to use Windows Vista on physical computer since my father, as far as I know, never liked upgrades. He bought a Vista laptop (Acer Aspire 5720z) somewhere in 2008 and he downgraded to XP as soon as he turned it on. The laptop had 2 GB RAM and Pentium processor (dual-core, not really sure which one) so I think it won't run Vista really bad (or maybe it would). He used XP until around 2016 and then decided to upgrade to 7 (by an advice of his brother who has been using Windows 7 for a long time), thus skipped Vista, and not long time after that he bought a new Windows 10 laptop, but decided to install 7 anyways. I used Vista only on a VM with pretty much same specs as his Acer laptop and it ran fine, without any big problems (but on a VM, so no wonder it worked that way)
Funnily enough, I have a 733MHz Pentium 3 with 256mb of ram, tried vista yesterday. Somehow seems more responsive than xp, and it can do aero due to the gpu being 7 years newer than everything else
Your channel's contents never stop impressing me, it really deserves more subs.
I remember buying an LCD monitor at that time that actually had a “Vista Compatible” sticker on it. The hysteria was so out of control that people were afraid to buy even the most basic of peripherals out of fear of experiencing compatibility issues. Crazy.
Ah yes Vista Service Pack 2...that's what I had. I had no issues with Vista. Loved the gadgets on the side of the screen (always there and visible). I also loved the look of Aero Glass.
Please Install Extended Kernel on Windows Vista.
I've recently purchased a brand new sealed copy of the full (NOT upgrade, so it was expensive AF) Windows Vista Ultimate. I'm planning on doing an unboxing and have set up a partition aside to install it and after watching this video I seriously can't wait!
The most underrated and misunderstood OS ever.
Vista was way ahead of it's time, requirements were steep and drivers weren't mature at all.
By the second half of 2008, after SP1 and two performance updates, Vista became much better than XP, but Windows 7 was just around the corner....
I really liked how you justified Windows Vista's failure which many still do not understand that the hardware wasn't enough powerful. We are facing the same problem again with Windows 11 but it hasn't received so much criticism as Microsoft didn't allow unsupported hardware which was 3 yrs old or older to run it. I also really like the asthetics and the unique features like dreamscenes. I do admit that it's still buggy but no Windows is bugproof!
By the way, at 9:32, it's actually doesn't support mp4 but instead wmv as all the default dreamscenes are in WMV and Vista doesn't support MP4 without additional codecs from what I have experienced. I really like Windows Vista and still use it today !
Well in my days I tried to find a Vista disk but I couldn't get one so I never had a chance to use it, so I upgraded from xp to 7 instead.
Everything worked including the aero theme on 1gb ram and no gpu.
My experience with Vista was pretty much the same as yours. I adopted it early on as I wanted to develop with DirectX 10. Initially the OS had some issues with stability and performance, but the service packs pretty much cleaned it up.
Other than that, drivers and applications weren't always mature enough (Vista was the first OS where applications were running without admin rights on standard consumer machines. Many applications were writing to parts of the filesystem or registry that only an admin could. They had to be updated to play by the Microsoft rules that had been around for ages).
And yes, by the time Windows 7 came out, most people had powerful enough hardware, so that wasn't an issue. Drivers also weren't an issue anymore. And applications played nice when not running as admin, so that was solved as well.
So Windows 7 was mostly clever marketing. People who didn't want to upgrade to Vista, would go to 7. But if you would have put them on Vista with all the updates, their experience would probably have been 99% the same.
I had Vista and it was absolutely fine! Especially after a few patches. Prior to that I also owned Windows ME and I never had any complaints about that either. Maybe I'm easily pleased!
Windows ME was absolute rubbish.. IIRC I bought a new machine that was ME certified and it was shockingly unstable... I upgraded to XP on the day it was released and it was a million times better... so much more stable, it "Just worked", even though it new. Dont recall any issue with drivers or anything (may be because it was relatively new hardware anyway).
ME on my old Dell Optiplex GX260 ran well with full USB support. Was trying to get 98SE on it but USB support is very flaky.
Windows ME and Vista are fine as long as you don't plan upgrading your machine.
I totally agree Windows 7 is Windows Mojave. I was the biggest Windows 7 fan, during its beta program. Then just before RTM I switched back to Vista for next few years and the main reason was performance. Let's say that contrary to common belief GUI performance of Windows 7 decreased compared to Vista. WDDM 1.1 drivers saved from 50MB to maybe at most 200MB in extreme cases of system memory at the expense of severly impacting drawing performance and keeping some junk in video ram even when I had tons of RAM (Vista didn't cling to content in video RAM like Win7 did because it always had copy in system RAM). Where it came to it: benchmarks favored Vista SP2. I mean game benchmarks and GUI benchmarks. Only benchmarks which rely heavily on disk performance didn't but this was due to two things: 1. background services didn't really wait until user was away and tried to squeeze activity while user him/herself was active leading to latency issues. 2. Vista was configured for file system resiliency. In other words if there was power failure Vista's way it did write operation in file system would lead to less issues. Win7 by default was configured more like XP so potentially less safe but faster, especially when writing a lot of small files. Back to benchmarks I rememeber typical comment of reviewer was "Surprisingly Vista SP2 is marginally faster than Windows 7. In time as programs are written for newest Microsoft operating system this trend will surely change..." and then go back to notion that Windows 7 is the faster OS even if all the benchmarks just proved otherwise. Personally I had to drop Vista as AMD dropped support for this OS. Over the years Microsoft made this OS obsolete with dropping support for it in Visual Studio compilers so today a lot of programs won't work on it. In fact its compatibility isn't any better than XP. Windows 7 can be however used instead for Aero experience.
Excellent video. I used Vista for a year in 2009 and liked it quite a bit, but Windows 7 was just a better, more functional version of Vista with slightly better performance. Was there any reason to use Vista once 7 came out? They’re SO similar
They both are visually SO much better than 10 and 11! I hate that “bland and uninspiring” is in style right now..
the first laptop I ever owned ran windows Vista and I never had any issues with it. I ran Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 on there as well as a couple of music production programs. That Aero theme was real cool to look at for sure but there was a load of custom themes on DeviantArt that I loved to mess around with. I wish that sort of thing were possible on Windows 10 and 11.
I went from 95 to 98 to ME to Vista to 8 to 8.1 and now to 10. I never even used 7.. Vista was perfectly fine.
Back in the day I purchased a dell inspiron 518 that came with Vista it has a intel core 2 quad with 8 gb memory and a 500 gb hdd it also has a add innvideo card. I'd say I loved Vista it ran perfectly in that computer. Actually, to this day, I still have that computer. It now has Windows 10 of course. I still have the factory restor disks, though. I no longer use that old computer I upgraded to a newer machine dell still works after all these years.
It ran Vista, then 7, then a free upgrad win 10, then shortly after the win 10 upgrad in 2016, I upgraded to a newer machine.
Thanks for this Dan. I ran Vista with no problems but I did have a pretty high end PC at the time so perhaps my experience was different to most people. Windows 7 was one of my favorite PC O/S's and it was mostly a refined version of Vista so they were on the right track, its just Vista was Toxic at that point so needed a rebrand
After Amiga OS Vista was the first OS I really liked. It ran rock stable, fast and beautiful, Aero Glass was amazing and Defender warned you if nasty root kit like DRM's like SecuROM or StarForce infiltrated your system and gave the option to block it from startup.
Things I'd like to have today instead of ugly duck Win 10, 11...
Great video, thank you very much!
i would like for you to try Amog Os, if you can, also make a video
I never had any issues with Vista. I had the Home Premium edition and it was a great OS. I never understood why there was any hate for it.
The first release was quite bogged down with constant disk access. SP1 fixed that and many other issues.
Windows vista was ahead of almost every machine at that time, that was the problem. Actually, from my opinion, is the best looking and cool windows, ever created.
I hated trying to navigate around things like the control panel in Vista. Parts of it had a new skin while others didn't, and settings were harder to find. Windows 7 made some of this easier, but it had some of the old UI quirks where you'd pop into a setting and get presented with the old XP UI. I also remember the hardware requirements were a bit of an issue. My father owns a Dell that shipped with Vista and ran like crap. We put XP on it, and it's still running like a champ (in 2022).
So, I wasn't a fan of Vista. But I liked ME. I guess that makes me weird 🙂
I still have Vista on my Laptop I don’t ever remember it giving me any trouble. I did boost my ram. I still have room for more RAM but it does seem to need more. I did music for jukeboxes on it and simple graphics.
Its server edition counterpart, win server 2008 run a bit slower than newer 2012 on same hardware.
It was DEFINITELY the worst windows OS I had used, by a long shot, and this worst list includes the hideous windows 8 as well. Vista was extremely sluggish, naggy with the system user warnings, incompatible with most of my software, and incompatible with many devices. Vista is the reason behind the extended license for netbooks of the era to come with XP instead, since vista was too sluggish. My newly bought laptop was unbearably slow and in a couple of days, I wiped the hell out of it, and installed a fresh xp on it, which made it 5x faster! Similarly, in the military, and as a nerd, I was tasked to wipe out a few of the vista pcs in the battalion.
You could try giving syphilis a second chance, but I would not recommend it. Wait, wasn't it Vista that made people's urination painful?
Seriously, though, I tried to fix problems on many people's Vista machines. I only saw one Vista machine which wasn't extremely slow. That one had 6G of RAM installed, which was a very large amount at the time.
I had Vista on a Dell Inspiron laptop back then, had a core 2 duo. I remember it only came with 4GB of ram and it could be a bit sluggish at times, so I got another stick which helped a bit. Honestly most of it I think had to do with Hard Drives of the time. SSD would run blazing fast. I do remember using it on other peoples computer's and it being almost unusable, but it was because they were on the old service pack or something. I know I fixed it. The transition from Vista to 7 for me wasn't a huge difference. The Vista laptop crapped on the old pentium XP desktop I had. Also, a lot of people back then did have under performing hardware. Laptops especially. It wasn't really until after the core 2 era that we started getting adequate hardware for their operating systems. A lot of PC's back then didn't even have 4GB of ram.
Funny thing, I'm just in the process of decommissioning an old Vista system that I built when Vista was new and have used continually since then, initially as my main system and later running some legacy stuff I didn't want cluttering newer systems. Over the years I've disabled a few functions for security reasons but overall it's been a pretty pleasant and stable experience without major issues and I actually prefer the look and feel over Win10.
Vista was the most misunderstood Windows version ever. It wasn't meant as an upgrade for old systems, but was a properly new OS for brand new systems. My first Vista system had a dual core CPU, 4GB RAM, RAID0 drive setup, and powerful graphics. Vista was fast, slick and stable. It felt like a definite upgrade over XP. Would it be an "upgrade" on an old system? Of course not. I've personally never seen getting a more modern OS for hardware I've been using for a while as an "upgrade". A new OS is something you get for your shiny new hardware. And if you did it that way, Vista was great.
Man I loved putting the widgets all over the side bar when I used vista
Vista looked good, the only trouble is there was some kind of issue where the second child window to an application main window when opened meant you couldn't move the main window as it wouldn't let you. I think Windows 7 fixed this. This alone was reason to either patch it (not sure if it was) or just go on to 7 as soon as it was released. If it wasn't for that there might not have been too much difference between the two. But I certainly would not use Vista at all simply for the fact Windows 7 came out. Luckily I don't use either now as I am on Linux :D
Can you do a Vista vs 7 visual / design comparison video?
I agree with you. Vista was a mess when it came out because of the demanding hardware requirements most people couldn't meet. By the end of it's days it was actually pretty stable and certainly usable.
I did some computer training for older people with Vista machines back in 2016 (because of licencing) and it worked as smooth as Windows 7.
Vista laid the foundation for many features we now associate with win 7. The new audio system was a really needed upgrade but companies are just lazy and their lazyness caused problems. Also new driver model for everything else.
My first experience with Vista was with RC1 that came with a computer's magazine in Summer of 2006. I wondered what was that and it was a early stage of Vista before RTM. I had a new pc short after Summer 2006 but the specs weren't great... pentium 4 531 at 3.0ghz, single 512mb ddr 400, nvidia geforce 6200 256mb vram, 160gb sata hdd from maxtor (this hdd had amnesia for sometime, firmware issue). When I installed RC1, it was beautiful and painfully slow. The computer's magazine made a dvd menthly available with fresh drivers and kept installing vista/xp alternatelly. I got bored of always doing this and kept using xp until I got a copy of pirated vista plus activation.
The RC1 copy came with a cd-key and I was able to activate with that key by phoning MS center and noted the numbers on a paper for a late use, it would work as long as the hardware never changed.
Vista was fine for me but I had no capable hardware and software made for xp didn't run that well.
I remember getting a OEM disc from a friends to reinstall on his moms computer, and was just inlove with the holographic disc like windows xp. I miss physical media....
When I used Vista, it ran hard and fast, even on lower-end hardware. In fact, I may see about using my older rig once I get set up with my upgrade. I know talking heads are screaming "security risks" but DAMNIT it ran faster than 7!
Was not expecting a video from you tonight, luckily I have a cold beer in my hand....you know where this is going by now.... Downloading your vid as I write this. 🤘😎👍
I still have a vista laptop, Its my main laptop. It's amazing I still can run a lot of what I need.
I am the upgrading tho.
People only give Vista a bad rep because they were old enough to remember when it sucked. Windows 98 boomers like me remember the XP experience sucking ass, because of shit like the Windows Update bug that gave everyone a huge virus that couldn't be removed easily, and compatibility issues that weren't resolved until years of service packs and updates. Everyone loves XP because they grew up with it as a kid, though. Not Vista. Give it a few years and Vista will become the underdog, and get a shitton of people who *also* grew up with it giving it lots of praise and recognition, both of which I feel it deserves. Vista pioneered what we take for granted in Windows today, with things like the mobility center, network and sharing center, window transparency, snap-to features (which would be built upon by 7 and later expanded by 11.), better user security, and so on.
After all the service packs came out I thought it was fine
I find it very sad, that so many people hate windows vista just out of trend. I always liked it because it made the "modern" windows and it looked absolutely beautifully. Its just sad, that many people who say its really bad, actually never used it.
I know and they think that the things in Vista are from Windows 7.
Windows 2000 were my favorite Windows ever. In fact so reliable i only rebooted PC 1 time every 6 months for fun.
Around year 2010 or so, Microsoft themselves said Win 2000 were their most reliable Windows.
I don’t know how to find, download and install network drivers. Could someone help me please? 🥺
OMG I loved these DreamScene Content's 🤩 I recently installed Windows Vista Ultimate Pack and i only got one DreamScene Content. If you have an archive of these or know where can i find these please give me a link. (English is not my first language sorry)
My Celeron D and IGP did not enjoy vista. However, my first C2D/HD4850 build made me fall in love with vista
I used Vista Business for a few years on my main pc at home and it actually was ok…
I actually had great memories with Vista. My Vista Laptop I bought in 2007 was my go to Laptop until 2013 before the Hard Drive failed on me. I loved Vista back then and love it today IMO It's still the most beautiful OS yet besides Windows 95/98.
Windows Vista, like a lot of operating systems, was dependent on the hardware to run well. If you had great hardware that could deal with the bloat, it was fine. You could also cut the bloat by turning off a lot of the added / useless features that were not a value add.
Speeding up loading anything from mass storage by caching it on USB drive?
Back in 2006 I have had 320gb and 500gb HDDs, which already were faster then any USB 2.0 pendrive would ever be (there is around 50mb/s speed limit, as rest is consumed by USB overhead, Windows never got above 40mb/s on usb 2.0). My drives were close to 100mb/s and probably even faster but my controller was limiting factor (66mb/s in 2006).
Trying to cache faster HDD on slower more complex device was terrible idea.
I missed the early hassle of Windows Vista and switched from XP to Vista when SP1 came out. Have only fond memories of that OS. :)
Something shady is going on with SDI, my virus scanner didn´t allow the download. Seems like a new company took over the recent versions and maybe that tool is no longer safe to use.
I found Snappy Driver Installer Origin, a fork of an earlier version, that is maintained by another person.
i have always said and will always say that vista was not as bad as everyone said it was. it was simply too ahead of its time. compared to windows releases now (cough cough, *11*) where its just a surface level ui makeover with a couple gimmicks and more bloatware, vista actually innovated a shit ton. it introduced so many features that are staples of modern windows like the search, uac, defender, etc. some of its ui is still present in windows 11 to this day (not sure whether this is a testament to how good vista was or how lazy microsoft is). also the aero glass theme was absolutely beautiful and the decision to scrap it in favor of flat oversimplified garbage in windows 8 was so stupid. windows 7 being a more refined version of vista makes windows 7 my favorite os of all time