gdjacobs wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

As well as massive corporations developing the thing as opposed to the GNU/Linux 'community'.

Yet they haven't solved the problem of how to insulate users from their lack of technical savvy.

sure they did, Vista did a great job of it but people complained about it always asking premission 🤣

The way I see it, it's too outdated to be useful as a day to day OS, and not outdated enough to be useful for running old games.

I recently replaced Vista & HDD with Xubuntu 16.04 & SSD on my parents laptop and now it is experiencing a second youth. 😎

Defining the word like everybody else does, I'd say it's not retro retro enough if it deliberately cripples native 9x/XP compatibility and can handle anything newer than DX9.

Vista was a worthless piece of trash that couldn't die soon enough, and I'm being a 100% nice and unbiased here. It was put out there for the sole purpose of keeping the cash flowing into the company (whether or not you think that's a good thing it makes no matter), but it served no legitimate purpose beyond that because everything it supposedly did, XP would have been able to do better yet without any of the plagues and bloat that make this OS such an unpleasant experience.

DosDaddy wrote:

Defining the word like everybody else does, I'd say it's not retro retro enough if it deliberately cripples native 9x/XP compatibility and can handle anything newer than DX9.

Vista was a worthless piece of trash that couldn't die soon enough, and I'm being a 100% nice and unbiased here. It was put out there for the sole purpose of keeping the cash flowing into the company (whether or not you think that's a good thing it makes no matter), but it served no legitimate purpose beyond that because everything it supposedly did, XP would have been able to do better yet without any of the plagues and bloat that make this OS such an unpleasant experience.

On the contrary. Vista was the first of a new breed of Windows, focusing more on things like security, virtualization, multicore computing and whatnot.
You might want to read some whitepapers on Vista's new technology. It's the basis on which Win7/8/10 are built.
You can find quite a lot of info on MSDN/technet. You could start here for example:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc162494.aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... t.10).aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2 … istakernel.aspx

The I/O prioritizing in particular is a technology I love, and really notice on a modern system with multiple cores, running multiple programs at the same time.
It makes HDD performance so much better, and you can actually hear it doing its job. You don't get the extreme 'scratching' from the HDD when it's constantly switching between threads, and therefore between files/positions on the HDD, that you get in XP and earlier versions of Windows.

Running XP on a system with 4 or more cores, doing heavy multitasking, feels like the OS simply doesn't know what to do with all the resources, and makes it about as unresponsive as a system with 1 or 2 cores.

DosDaddy wrote:

Vista was a worthless piece of trash that couldn't die soon enough, and I'm being a 100% nice and unbiased here.

Riiiiight. You are also being 100% knowledgeable and have lots of technical data and experience to back it up. 🤣

DosDaddy wrote:

Defining the word like everybody else does, I'd say it's not retro retro enough if it deliberately cripples native 9x/XP compatibility and can handle anything newer than DX9.

Vista was a worthless piece of trash that couldn't die soon enough, and I'm being a 100% nice and unbiased here. It was put out there for the sole purpose of keeping the cash flowing into the company (whether or not you think that's a good thing it makes no matter), but it served no legitimate purpose beyond that because everything it supposedly did, XP would have been able to do better yet without any of the plagues and bloat that make this OS such an unpleasant experience.

Actually Vista was a very decent experience for a lot of people, the slow down and lag comes mainly from the replacement network stack in Vista SP0 which was largely fixed by SP1, it was harder to get a virus on Vista than XP, it was more secure, and low and behold it didn't look like Microsoft outsourced the UI design to a toy company.

Another reason Vista seemed slow to a lot of people is because they upgraded their XP systems, and the system specs were fine for XP, but on the low end for Vista. And Vista drivers took awhile to mature. By then, people already formed their opinions.

clueless1 wrote:

Another reason Vista seemed slow to a lot of people is because they upgraded their XP systems, and the system specs were fine for XP, but on the low end for Vista. And Vista drivers took awhile to mature. By then, people already formed their opinions.

Yea, but in the spirit of retrocomputing (seems appropriate for this forum)... try installing Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 10 on the same system (something Core2 Duo or newer would be fine).
Then form new opinions.
You'll probably find that Vista runs about as well for everyday tasks as the newer OSes.

Scali wrote:

Yea, but in the spirit of retrocomputing (seems appropriate for this forum)... try installing Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 10 on the same system (something Core2 Duo or newer would be fine).
Then form new opinions.
You'll probably find that Vista runs about as well for everyday tasks as the newer OSes.

Except if it's too new - you will hit a wall of missing drivers.

Scali wrote:

Yea, but in the spirit of retrocomputing (seems appropriate for this forum)... try installing Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 10 on […]
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clueless1 wrote:

Another reason Vista seemed slow to a lot of people is because they upgraded their XP systems, and the system specs were fine for XP, but on the low end for Vista. And Vista drivers took awhile to mature. By then, people already formed their opinions.

Yea, but in the spirit of retrocomputing (seems appropriate for this forum)... try installing Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 10 on the same system (something Core2 Duo or newer would be fine).
Then form new opinions.
You'll probably find that Vista runs about as well for everyday tasks as the newer OSes.

I did on a Phenom, and Vista craps out on alot of newer tasks, IE9 for starters doesn't render most of the web correctly anymore and gets out of date errors contantly, firefox and chrome same issue no support and before long they will have issues, Java and Flash are no longer updated. Its already starting to be less useful than 7

candle_86 wrote:

I did on a Phenom, and Vista craps out on alot of newer tasks, IE9 for starters doesn't render most of the web correctly anymore and gets out of date errors contantly

Well duh 😀
That's the web. For some reason, web devs never think about legacy, and are insistent on using the latest features in their favourite browser, even if they aren't standardized yet.

candle_86 wrote:

firefox and chrome same issue no support and before long they will have issues, Java and Flash are no longer updated. Its already starting to be less useful than 7

You can still run reasonably recent versions of Firefox and Chrome, and they work just fine.
Did you test any actual programs? We all know that web technology doesn't count as real software.

My installation of Vista contains various development tools such as Visual Studio 2010, Netbeans, Notepad++, and also stuff like Acrobat Reader, some version of Office (not the latest, not sure which one, not really relevant. The point is not to run the latest software, but to see if you can get a modern-day working environment and experience equivalent to Windows 7 or newer).
I also have PowerDVD on there, for example (I think it's version 15).

All that works like a charm really.

Well, Firefox/Chrome are not web technology. They are actual software.

The reason Chrome stopped supporting Vista is because Google is a huge corporation and does not want to waste resources on validating their software for anything that has a negligible market share.

The reason Firefox stopped supporting Vista is because Mozilla hasn't had an original idea in years, and the only thing they do nowadays is copy everything that Google does, only later and worse.

Other than these two, the only software that doesn't work is... software from Microsoft itself. IE10/IE11, and anything that uses the flat window UI, which means VS 2012+, Office 2013+. VS 2010 is already considered quite old in terms of development suite lifecycles.

Scali wrote:

Yea, but in the spirit of retrocomputing (seems appropriate for this forum)... try installing Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 10 on […]
Show full quote

clueless1 wrote:

Another reason Vista seemed slow to a lot of people is because they upgraded their XP systems, and the system specs were fine for XP, but on the low end for Vista. And Vista drivers took awhile to mature. By then, people already formed their opinions.

Yea, but in the spirit of retrocomputing (seems appropriate for this forum)... try installing Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 10 on the same system (something Core2 Duo or newer would be fine).
Then form new opinions.
You'll probably find that Vista runs about as well for everyday tasks as the newer OSes.

I didn't say *I* felt this way, I was trying to explain why Vista has such a bad rap today. People form opinions early and hold onto them tightly. Many of us here know better because of the nature of what we do (retro).

Mozilla will support XP & Vista through the ESR channel until 2018.

Scali wrote:

On the contrary. Vista was the first of a new breed of Windows, focusing more on things like security

Oh come on. Had Vista itself been any more of a NSA trojan horse, NOD32 would have picked it up and wiped out the entire HD.

Scali wrote:

virtualization, multicore computing and whatnot. […]
Show full quote

virtualization, multicore computing and whatnot.

You might want to read some whitepapers on Vista's new technology. It's the basis on which Win7/8/10 are built.
You can find quite a lot of info on MSDN/technet. You could start here for example:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc162494.aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... t.10).aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2 … istakernel.aspx

The I/O prioritizing in particular is a technology I love, and really notice on a modern system with multiple cores, running multiple programs at the same time.
It makes HDD performance so much better, and you can actually hear it doing its job. You don't get the extreme 'scratching' from the HDD when it's constantly switching between threads, and therefore between files/positions on the HDD, that you get in XP and earlier versions of Windows.

In vista these features were stillborn at best, and only solidified more or less adequately in Win7. This added to the helpless amount of bloatware services (that couldn't be disabled without significant loss of functionality), made Vista so sluggish and unstable it was almost as useless as XP before SP1.

Scali wrote:

Running XP on a system with 4 or more cores, doing heavy multitasking, feels like the OS simply doesn't know what to do with all the resources, and makes it about as unresponsive as a system with 1 or 2 cores.

XP wasn't designed for that type of hardware so it's not a fair comparison, but even then, there's this nice little thing called "affinity" wherewith you may launch any application and balance out the load to your liking.

All in all, XP belongs to the high-end, single-core CPU era, and at that you still can't beat it. Vista...just plain abominable.

candle_86 wrote:

So Vista is 3 weeks outside of support with less than 1% market share, does it not qualify for Retro

Sorry Jean-Luc...

Vista is not retro. Retro usually implies games or software that only run on that particular operating system making it nostalgic. Plus Vista is quite beautiful compared to say Windows 7. I love that old classic 98/2K user interface.

Vista would have been retro had Windows 7 not arrived and became the XP 64 bit equivalent of an undying OS.

At the moment Vista is hampered by no USB 3.0 support. You can patch to SP2 and DX11 making it close to Windows 7 however. But the USB 3.0 will only be an issue for onboard USB. You can install a 3rd party USB card and it should support Vista but whether it has true USB 3.0 speeds I haven't tested.

But from user interface standpoint Vista has the best 64bit user interface. Too bad it can't run all Windows 7 games. I think it has become the Windows 2000 of the 64 bit era. XP 32-bit and W7 64-bit should run almost 95% of Windows stuff that was ever created.

DosDaddy wrote:

In vista these features were stillborn at best, and only solidified more or less adequately in Win7.

Because?

DosDaddy wrote:

This added to the helpless amount of bloatware services (that couldn't be disabled without significant loss of functionality), made Vista so sluggish and unstable it was almost as useless as XP before SP1.

So there were some bugs in SP0, that was already covered (as if there weren't in other versions of Windows, or other OSes altogether). Vista today has these fixes, your argument is invalid.

DosDaddy wrote:

XP wasn't designed for that type of hardware so it's not a fair comparison

Lolwut? Do you have any idea where Windows NT comes from? It has supported multi-CPU and multi-core systems since its inception in the early 90s.
XP was certainly designed for that type of hardware. The technology just wasn't as advanced yet as it is in later versions of Windows.
In fact, Windows XP was the first OS to have specific optimizations for HyperThreading (supporting up to 32 logical cores).

DosDaddy wrote:

but even then, there's this nice little thing called "affinity" wherewith you may launch any application and balance out the load to your liking.

Again, lolwut?
Did you even try to read the above links, about IO prioritizing and such? Because if you did, and you understood even just a small percentage, you'd know that thread affinity doesn't help you there in the least.

Aside from that, thread affinity is little more than a hack for when the software and/or the OS doesn't know which cores to use, or how many.
It's not something I want to have to rely on to get a decent user experience in everyday use.

DosDaddy wrote:

All in all, XP belongs to the high-end, single-core CPU era, and at that you still can't beat it. Vista...just plain abominable.

Again, your argument is invalid.

Firtasik wrote:

Mozilla will support XP & Vista through the ESR channel until 2018.

One reason I love Firefox for their extended XP support. Glad they included Vista. 😀 Don't forget Opera and SeaMonkey as alternative XP browsers.

clueless1 wrote:

Another reason Vista seemed slow to a lot of people is because they upgraded their XP systems, and the system specs were fine for XP, but on the low end for Vista. And Vista drivers took awhile to mature. By then, people already formed their opinions.

This was true. Vista was ahead of its time when it first came out. A lot of times Microsoft and those computer companies made an agreement to bundle Vista with a laptop or desktop that was under the recommended specs. Usually something like 1-2GB Ram and a Dualcore. Vista SP2 with DX11 runs perfectly smooth and fine on a quadcore Z77. All drivers are present for the most part. Had Vista come out when they released Windows 7 I think we would be using Vista 64-bit because by then at least most computers could handle Vista properly and memory 8GB and higher became a reality. Vista and W7 are memory hogs compared to XP. Even doing a simple file search on Vista / W7 the memory usage just keeps growing.

95DosBox wrote:

Vista SP2 with DX11 runs perfectly smooth and fine on a quadcore Z77.

Am I the only one who sometimes finds it outrageous that we normalize this? There was a time not long ago where the equivalent computing power of NASA or the NSA was the same as can now be purchased in the form of your Z77/Core i5 which is now apparently the standard platform for all our banal tasks. We've also rationalized away the inefficiency of modern operating systems as some measure of progress.

Compositing is a good thing, but it shouldn't have presented such a performance problem even for basic integrated graphics accelerators. What else did Vista bring to the table that required and was worth such a cost in computing power?