Reply 80 of 249, by Scali
wrote:Vista and W7 are memory hogs compared to XP.
This, especially the 'and W7' part.
Vista took the fall for the higher system requirements of this 'new generation' of Windows OSes.
Windows 7 was no better, but nobody complained about that. And even today, as we see in this thread for example, people complain about Vista for being resource-hungry, but Windows 7 gets a free pass.
I've always found it quite ironic that people make it sound like Vista is one of the worst versions of Windows ever, and Windows 7 is one of the best.
In reality, Vista and Windows 7 are very close together, and you're not too far from the truth if you say that Windows 7 is 'Vista SP3'.
Until recently, there was very little that Vista couldn't do, which Windows 7 can. Today, things are skewed somewhat because Vista is EOL, and most vendors no longer bother to support their software and hardware on Vista anymore. Windows 7 will reach that point in the near future as well, and in fact, already there are quite a few things you can't do on Windows 7 today... For example, you won't get DirectX 12, and some newer software from Microsoft, such as the newer Visual Studios, don't work on Windows 7 either (which at least makes some sense, since they can also target the Universal Windows Platform, which isn't present in Windows 7 in the first place. And by extension you also can't develop for Windows phones, tablets and related devices on Windows 7).
I suppose we should also mention WIndows 8/8.1 here. They are similar to Vista/Windows 7, in the sense that Windows 8 brought some new technology (start of the UWP and Phone/Tablet support), but Windows 10 did it in a more refined and widely accepted way.
Windows 8 is now unsupported as well. But since Windows 10 was a free upgrade from Windows 8, I don't think many people were all that bothered. In fact, the first version of Windows 10 is also EOL already. Microsoft is moving more quickly these days. Let people upgrade for free, but get them to upgrade more quickly, so you don't have to support outdated/buggy OSes until the end of time.
Sadly, not all software developers can keep up with that... My laptop from work gets stuck on upgrading Windows 10 to the Creators Update at 32%. This is most probably because of F-Secure being installed, which has some nasty bugs.