Muz, if you ask you should reply as well. Otherwise your topics make people suspicious of your intentions.
So, have you been mocked or would you mock Vista users?
I'd mock them 😉
I can see reasons to run Windows 9x, XP, W7 or 10, but Vista is not needed 😉

Edit: and you better get active in your topics or I'm gonna have to close the topic

Looking back now, I kind of like the Aero look of Windows Vista. However, back then, for various reasons (just browse through this forum and other forums), I completely skipped Vista and went straight to Windows 7.

I did, however, install Vista for one family member a couple of years ago (with all the Service Packs) and she never complained and, it actually worked quite well for her as a standard home based PC.

Having said that, I don't see the point to install Windows Vista, since Windows 7 has basically the same hardware requirements and just runs "better" (to use a very loose term).

I never got the gist of the hate against Vista, sure at first it was a Russian roulette in terms of stability but with time, Microsoft ironed out the bugs, mind you I used Vista as a daily driver up until I was faced with the lack of unsupported browsers (Palemoon was my last resort but it turned out to be a dead end as well)

So to speak, I kept Vista anyways for a old software that I rely on (the joys of proprietary hardware with specific software that is unobtinium), and bummer because that software actually checked if it was running on Vista, anything lower: crashed. Anything higher: didn't launch at all and threw a cryptic error message!

And to answer the question, No I didn't got mocked. Well some people thought I was flat out insane.

I was the one mocking.

I've done a little teasing, my fiance still has a laptop running Vista. I've upgraded it to it's full potential so that it's still barely usable for modern tasks but it does struggle with things like 1080p youtube. To be fair I don't think Win7/8/10 would help it enough to bother with the upgrade.

I don't hate Vista, I think if MS had set the minimum requirements a little higher - it would have been much better received.

BinaryDemon wrote:

I've done a little teasing, my fiance still has a laptop running Vista. I've upgraded it to it's full potential so that it's still barely usable for modern tasks but it does struggle with things like 1080p youtube. To be fair I don't think Win7/8/10 would help it enough to bother with the upgrade.

I don't hate Vista, I think if MS had set the minimum requirements a little higher - it would have been much better received.

A little higher? A little higher?

WAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA. More like they should have tripled it.

I had to do warranty repair of the absolute bottom of the barrel "Vista Ready" PCs running Vista. Staying on a call for 2-3 hours waiting for a piece of trash brand new PC to do it's thing because it has such low end components that it might have been just ok-ish for XP was a joke.

Coincidentally, I just acquired my very first "Windows Vista Capable" PC. It's a Core 2 Duo Dell from 2006. (I jumped straight from Pentium 4 to Core i7 so missed out on this era.) It's currently running XP and I'll probably leave it at that. Is Vista really necessary to run early/mid 2000s games? Practically everything released in that decade ran on XP.

I don't see the point of anyone running Vista even for "retro" purposes since machines that run Vista can run 7 as well. But yeah, XP is perfectly fine for that rig... what are the specs? I have an Optiplex 330 I've upgraded to Q8400 and 4GB RAM for Windows XP stuff

oeuvre wrote:

I don't see the point of anyone running Vista even for "retro" purposes since machines that run Vista can run 7 as well. But yeah, XP is perfectly fine for that rig... what are the specs? I have an Optiplex 330 I've upgraded to Q8400 and 4GB RAM for Windows XP stuff

Technically, I agree. However, I do run Vista SP2 (64-bit) on one of my retro systems (together with XP SP3). The reason is that I want to play those early DX10 games the way I did back then (from an OS perspective). And this means Vista.

So many users here apply a principle they call "period-correctness" to their systems. Some of those users are really stringent in their approach (targeting not even a certain year, but a specific month). Especially for this sub-group there is no way around Vista if they want to go full-on period correct while playing BioShock, Crysis and the likes 😉

I have used Vista (64-bit) from day 1, but it always shared the HDD with XP SP3. It never convinced me enough to replace XP. Vista (and XP SP3) were both replaced on my main gaming system the day Win 7 came out.

To the OP. No, I have never been mocked for using Vista (and I wouldn't have cared anyhow). On the other hand, to give it a little twist, I would definitely mock people for using Windows 10 🤣

I have been mocked for using Vista in the early days. But I had the last laugh: I used Vista to make my code future-proof, and to develop a DX10 engine.
When Windows 7 came around, I didn't have to do anything to my code anymore, I had already solved any sloppy rights issues etc.
And when DX11 came around, I mostly had to do search-and-replace to convert my DX10 code to DX11.
At the same time the other people struggled as their code broke down on Windows 7 in exactly the same ways as it did on Vista. And they were still stuck with outdated DX9 technology, and still had to figure out how the entirely new DX10/DX11 API design could be translated into a working engine.

I remember I stopped paying much attention to new CPU designs after 64-bit multi-core started to become mainstream (Core 2 Duo which at the time I thought was pretty sweet)... the reason being these CPUs were best for running a 64-bit multi-core OS, but Windows Vista was the only mainstream PC OS that did that - and I didn't like the way it implemented almost everything, and how RAM-hungry it was. This was before I discovered Linux. So Windows XP was my only option (never had XP 64-bit) and if I installed it on a 64-bit system it seemed like I wasn't getting the full potential of the machine.

I actually switched to Linux distros for a while (which opened my eyes to the possibility of an OS UI actually being *responsive* on a Pentium M and a 5400rpm HDD! Wow!) before finally leaving Windows XP for Windows 7. Nowadays I find it hard to justify using Windows at all except in a VM.

But yeah to this day I am impressed at what the humble Core 2 Duo can do with a properly optimized Windows 7 install and lots of RAM. Was probably the biggest CPU upgrade I experienced, going from Pentium 4 to C2D.

keenmaster486 wrote:

But yeah to this day I am impressed at what the humble Core 2 Duo can do with a properly optimized Windows 7 install and lots of RAM. Was probably the biggest CPU upgrade I experienced, going from Pentium 4 to C2D.

Had the same experience and 100% in agreement. Huge difference

I feel like reinstalling Windows Vista in my Inspiron laptop. Should I reinstall it?

Muz, please contribute a bit more to your topic than asking something and then moving on. That's part of the big problem people have with your posts.

Muz wrote:

I feel like reinstalling Windows Vista in my Inspiron laptop. Should I reinstall it?

What kind of Inspiron, since the Inspiron line encomposes laptops from the past 20+ years Muz. Is it a Windows XP P4 with some kind of radeon 8 or 9 series/x series gpu?
A dual core Athlon 64+ x2/ Turion laptop, A core duo/core2 / Geforce 7k series chipset laptop? A good Vista era laptop makes a great windows 7 laptop/xp laptop/ linux browser. What are you using it for man? Ya want to play some old games? Have fun! Ya want to web browse? Ya. . . .good luck. So, since we dont actually know why you would want to use Vista at all? . . .No. If you dont know why you would want to use an OS, you just shouldnt.

If it gives you the retro vibe you want, then install it on your Inspiron and don't worry about what other people say. Ten years ago I used to laugh at people who praised Windows 7 and derided Vista. The differences between the two operating systems are minor and superficial. That said, Vista is unsupported now and new applications refuse to install on it.