FFXIhealer wrote:

3rd Hate Reason: UAC

I've hated UAC for a long time, but It's a good ideea. I actually have it enabled on my win 8.1 / win 10 machines right now - it prevents sneaky software from installing w/o your knoladge. At first I had it left on for my parent's PCs, and (at the cost of annoying "this bla.exe thing is trying to run! Should I let it?" phone calls from them) noticed it quadrupled the life of operating systems on said machines

Oh yea, and I actually liked how vista looked a little better then I like win7.

Thought I would drop in about my experience with Vista. When I first used it on an old Athlon XP 2700+ or 2800+ with 768MB of RAM (was originally 512MB) back in January/February 2007, it was definitely not smooth sailing. The minimum requirements were definitely misleading for Vista at least in the RAM department. If anything, I would say you needed at least 1GB of RAM to really get good experience in terms of RAM on the minimum. I can actually witness several applications running slow under Vista at the time compared to XP. DOSBox definitely ran slower (and that was a few months before 0.70 came out, the one update that pretty much changed everything performance wise). For the curious, I've been using DOSBox since 2005 (about three years since it was first developed I assume).

Driver incompatibility was definitely prevalent. While my mouse and keyboard worked fine along with sound, my old webcam ceased to function properly on it. It was a Creative WebCam Pro I believe. Only had that webcam for like 3 years at least and it ceased to work properly. It was never updated to Vista drivers either (as there were none). Got a new webcam a year later (which was also my first one to have a microphone built in). A Microsoft Lifecam VX-7000.

In terms of game compatibility, several games were definitely broken under Vista or didn't plain flat out work right. Not counting full screen DOS games since I already was moving on to DOSBox anyway. Dungeon Keeper 2 for instance had problems with Hardware Acceleration where it would have glitchy graphics when turned on. This problem was fixed in Windows 7 thankfully. Metal Fatigue also suffered problems of not working right under Vista. While the game does get to the main menu, the game was virtually unplayable (try clicking play through Skirmish or even try clicking Campaign and they will not work). Another game that was partially fixed in Windows 7, but ended up with some issues related to Direct3D. Fortunately, using a Glide Wrapper helps resolve that situation. Any game that used Retained Mode will not work at all on Vista or later. It's still that way believe it or not. Only way to fix that is find the DLL for it online. Vista might've been one of the first versions where Star Wars: Episode I Racer ended up with severe graphical glitches. For years, it was pretty much unplayable (even on today's Windows OSes). However, dgVoodoo2 definitely solves that problem now. Railroad Tycoon 3 is probably one of the most interesting cases of not functioning right. Worked fine under XP, but was definitely broken with default unchanged settings on Vista and later. However, it is apparently possible to get it working again by turning off T&L for that game (but you have to do it through a config file).

While Service Pack updates no doubt improved it, I was definitely impressed when I actually tested Windows 7 two years later (months before it got released that same year in 2009). It was definitely smoother and more refined than Vista. To put it this way, it was a more complete Vista. It was even smooth on a Virtual Machine running at 64-bit while running on a 32-bit OS (thanks to AMD-V or hardware virtualization)!

About three years ago, my aunt was looking for a desktop PC at home that she could use for basic browsing and simple office related work (Word, checking e-mails, etc.).
So, as a fun project, I decided to install Vista (with Service Pack 2 and the Platform Updates) on the following hardware:

• AMD Athlon XP 2000+
• Gigabyte GA-7VRX motherboard (VIA KT333 chipset - probably one of the few chipset manufacturers that actually continued to provide driver support for their older chipsets on Vista)
• 1 GB of RAM (anything less doesn't achieve acceptable performance)
• AMD (ATI) Radeon X800

It ran surprisingly well with Vista for someone just looking for a basic PC. So, I decided to leave it like that and the PC is still running Vista 🤣
However, I will probably have to upgrade that PC to Windows 7, due to Vista's support ending in April 2017.

As already mentioned by some other users in this thread, at first I wasn't impressed by the UAC and Vista's poor driver support. If you had an existing XP PC with a too old motherboard (think NForce 1 or 2 chipset), too old graphics card or too old sound card, you were basically screwed. And, it's memory requirements were also much higher than what the "average" PC of the day was still running on.

However, looking back now and with some later hardware, it's not a too bad of an OS and I kind of like the Aero themes. But, when Windows 7 was released, it kind of grew on me much faster than Vista did, so there was never any reason for me to fall back onto Vista.

I happily just installed Vista64 onto my modern-ish PC (ASRock P67 Performance,i5-3570K CPU @ 4.3GHz,GTX970,8 Gig GSkill DDR3-SDRAM PC3-12800).

Why? Cause I want one system that can do it all very well.

I have tons of 90's and 00's games I wish to run; both win7 and winXP have too many compatibly and limitation issues.

The glove is Vista and it fits well.

For what it's worth i have a pc running vista: phenom ii x6, 8gb ram, hd4850, m-audio 24/96. Used for photo storage/editing. I'm using vista 64 ultimate because i had the disk so why cough up for 7 or later, vista does the job and to my eye is nicer than later windows.

I wish it booted faster and try not to install anything new as modern stuff seems to upset it, i've had installs mess things so much i had to roll back (eg screen calibration hardware); and the motherboard realtek nic drivers routinely stopped working so in the end i used a tplink addon card.

Destroy wrote:

I have tons of 90's and 00's games I wish to run; both win7 and winXP have too many compatibly and limitation issues.

Probably, Vista have same limitations as Seven. The only major difference is DirectX, but later builds of Vista are DX 11 compatible, just like Win7.

ratfink wrote:

I wish it booted faster

That it won't. 😀 Windows 7 was the first OS where Microsoft actively decided to tackle boot time as an important metric. Later they took it to absurd by effectively removing the 1-second pause during which Windows polls for an F8 keypress during startup, making it significantly more difficult to get into the startup menu.

ratfink wrote:

and try not to install anything new as modern stuff seems to upset it, i've had installs mess things so much i had to roll back

I haven't gotten to the point where I messed up my Vista x64 install (it's still very stable with an original install date of late 2008), but one of the main limitation seems to be lack of drivers for any Intel USB 3.0 controllers. They just don't exist (and I don't know if Win7 drivers can be hacked to work in Vista). However, there are great working drivers for PCIe-to-USB3.0 cards from other vendors (NEC/Renesas, ASMedia, Fresco Logic). Even XP has such drivers.

ATauenis wrote:

Probably, Vista have same limitations as Seven.

Generally, true, but some very specific cases (or some very stupidly coded applications) may cause something to work better on Vista than on Win7.

ATauenis wrote:

The only major difference is DirectX, but later builds of Vista are DX 11 compatible, just like Win7.

There is no difference in Direct3D as far as I know, since Vista got DX11 in the platform update. There is a difference in Direct2D, because Win7 got D2D 1.1 in a later platform update (it was not part of the original DX11), and Vista did not, so it only supports D2D 1.0. This causes some font appearance issues in modern browsers that ditched D2D 1.0 code.

dr_st wrote:

There is no difference in Direct3D as far as I know, since Vista got DX11 in the platform update. There is a difference in Direct2D, because Win7 got D2D 1.1 in a later platform update (it was not part of the original DX11), and Vista did not, so it only supports D2D 1.0. This causes some font appearance issues in modern browsers that ditched D2D 1.0 code.

There are some minor differences... DirectX11 also has the sub-versions 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 and 11.4.
Vista only supports the basic 11.0 interfaces.
The original Windows 7 release also only had 11.0 support. There was a Platform Update for 7 which added partial support for 11.1, which was the version introduced in Windows 8.
Windows 8.1 introduced 11.2.
Windows 10 got 11.3, and in a later update also 11.4.

So there is a slight difference between Vista and Windows 7 with the Platform Update: Windows 7 has partial 11.1 support, Vista does not.
And Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 support even more DirectX 11.x versions.

Yup, Vista supporting DX11 was very nice at the time; it's why I skipped over buying win7 and went directly to win10 instead.

FWIW, my main motivation for reinstalling Vista is for my games that can't get around StarForce and to run all Mechwarrior2/3 engine games with minimally needed workarounds.

I used 32-bit Vista on a Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 2 GB RAM (or was that only 1 GB at the beginning?) for few years and it ran fine.
It took ages to boot but that was a rare occurrence before forced updates came to be (I use hybrid sleep all the time).
When I updated to Windows 7 I had mixed feelings really. All those anti-Vista people said it was the "next XP", but in reality Win7 further departed from XP in its interface giving next to nothing back that wasn't in Vista.

Sure, Vista ran poorly on 512 MB or so, which is what many older machines still had when it was released. But Win7's requirements aren't any lower.

PS. I still use that Q6600 as my main home machine, now with 4GB and Win10 (I skipped 8.x), still 32-bit only (one cannot upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit, and I'm too lazy to reformat).

The first PC I bought with my own money was a laptop with a 1.7GHz single core of some kind, 1Gb of RAM and GMA950 graphics (which probably took away 128mb of that 1024Mb of Ram). That thing was unbelievably slow, I remember trying to play GTA DA on it at 640*480... Bad memories. Windows XP went onto it as soon as I had wised up.

I would like to add a fourth reason for people hating Vista (and yeah I'm two years late I know!) : Driver auto installing, and installing the wrong one. So many times I would go to install GPU drivers and it would automatically install the basic windows one
I uninstall, restart, and it immediately installs them again when I get to the desktop so I couldn't install the proper GPU drivers. This also happened for a wireless adapter and the default drivers were crap.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

I would like to add a fourth reason for people hating Vista (and yeah I'm two years late I know!) : Driver auto installing, and installing the wrong one. So many times I would go to install GPU drivers and it would automatically install the basic windows one
I uninstall, restart, and it immediately installs them again when I get to the desktop so I couldn't install the proper GPU drivers. This also happened for a wireless adapter and the default drivers were crap.

It installs the best driver it can find in its driver store. What makes you think you can't install the proper driver on top of it? This is a user error, not a problem with the OS.

dr_st wrote:

It installs the best driver it can find in its driver store. What makes you think you can't install the proper driver on top of it? This is a user error, not a problem with the OS.

Indeed. It uses the product ID to determine what drivers to install. When you manually install drivers with a newer version for the given ID, it will not overwrite them.
Even so, if Windows Update offers newer drivers, you can still ignore the update manually.