shamino wrote:I was thinking more in terms of software/driver/game support, not general OS features or patches. As an OS for a retro PC, I don't see much appeal to Vista.
You make some good points. We need to make sure this discussion is carried on in the right context. 😀
I never claimed that Vista has any appeal as an OS for a retro PC, or for that point any appeal for any fresh PC install, except for historical purposes. Much like Win98 first edition has no such point. Win98/98SE is really the best analogy to Vista/7 in the history of Windows operating systems.
Still, I like to stand up against technical inaccuracy. So I just cannot let statements like "Vista is a crap OS" or "Vista cannot do anything better than XP" pass without an argument. And, yes, I know you weren't making quite these statements, but I think some were. 😉
shamino wrote:
I didn't even know what those are until looking up a quick description just now. It's a fine idea I guess, but it looks like a minor technical detail that few people (myself included) have ever had reason to notice or care about.
It's not the kind of thing you are supposed to notice or care about. When things don't work is when you start caring. 😀 MSI/MSI-X interrupts are much more useful in multi-core server environments dealing with heavy concurrent traffic, where people actually care about performance, but even in a home environment they are nice to have, as they do improve performance a little bit and make resource management simple. I personally had to debug a bizarre issue (in XP, of course) where a bug in the driver for the network controller was degrading performance of Cardbus devices, because it was hogging the interrupt line that they just happened to share. This would not happen on Vista (or any semi-modern Linux). 😉
shamino wrote:
It's a good safety net to add to S3 mode - it would be nice to have. I'm a habitual "save every 2 minutes" type of person though so I wouldn't be likely to leave an open document that hasn't been saved before I left.
It's not about losing data you didn't save. It's more about - I put my computer to sleep and the power went down for 5 seconds, and now I have to reopen all my applications.
shamino wrote:Did they finally add real symlinks?
Yes, they did. Including ones that go over across network drives. 😀
shamino wrote:Most current "Advanced format" drives use the 4KB/512e scheme which is compatible with legacy OSes, so the only wrinkle with those is that alignment affects performance. If you mean that Vista supports drives with strictly 4KB sectors, not using 512e, then that could be an eventual advantage whenever new drives drop the 512e compatibility scheme.
As far as Vista doing proper alignment with advanced format - I guess they get credit for trying but the support falls too short IMO. If it's not working out of the box, then you still can't install the OS on a new hard drive without your sectors being misaligned. Even if someone is adding a secondary drive to a working system, I can't comfortably recommend people to use Vista to partition a drive because they might not have the needed patches. I think even 7 has an issue with this, where it needs some service pack before this was fixed, so not everybody will have it working by default.
Actually, Vista (SP1+) by default will align the media correctly. The problem occurs strictly when moving an existing Windows install from a 512b sector drive to a 4K sector drive. Some Windows components don't like when things change under them, and for that purpose the patches are needed. It's a really bizarre issue - I wrote about it here.
shamino wrote:I'm not sure if you mean the same thing I'm thinking of, but I have been annoyed with a bug in XP with keyboard shortcuts. I have a keyboard shortcut for the Calculator, and when I use it, sometimes XP will freeze for 30+ seconds before it opens Calculator and the system resumes working as normal. It's a known bug that doesn't seem to have a fix, the only "solution" I know is to remove the keyboard shortcut and recreate it, but eventually it starts freezing up again.
Yes, it's the same exact f*king thing I'm talking about it. As someone who uses shortcut keys for all commonly used apps, it really bothers me.
You can add a couple more minor points which Vista has and XP does not: Native SDXC card support >32GB (minor because only affects PCI readers, not USB ones), and UEFI boot support (minor because only affects modern systems where neither OS has a place anyways).
The bottom line is that you can take every individual thing and say, "well, it's nice but one can do without it". This is true about Vista vs XP and Win7 vs Vista and every other incremental OS upgrade. At some point, though, either you find the one you really care about it, or just the bulk of them start making a difference. In terms of OS capabilities, it is wrong to think (as some do) that Vista is just XP with useless eye candy, and Win7 is revolutionary. The opposite is mostly true.
Software support is a different thing, and here, unfortunately, you are right that many software vendors ditched Vista support seemingly at the same time as XP support. You cannot really blame them, since Microsoft themselves have been doing all they could to make Vista all but forgotten. Of all these applications, I believe only a handful actually cannot run because it relies on components which do not exist. One thing that comes to mind is the flat Win8-style UI, which was backported to Win7, but probably not to Vista.
Most of the time when a vendor "drops" Vista support it is because they either forgot the OS exists, or because they are morons/a**holes. Or they just might be a huge corporation with a huge overhead of testing their stuff for every single platform, and do not want to bother to test for an OS which has a negligible install base at this point.
I can understand this point of view, since I've been involved with such software releases myself, and I know what this overhead means. If you are a small/medium size vendor you can go to your customers and say openly - "I cannot test everything, it will probably work, I cannot guarantee it, if you have issues - you are on your own, or at best I will give you a best-effort attempt, no promises." If you are a big vendor like Google, Intel, or Microsoft themselves - you cannot really say this, so it may be easier just to drop support altogether.
The worst thing is of course with drivers, because if a driver targets a specific OS, then getting it to work on a different one requires hacking, even if it really can work 100% glitch-free. And even a slight incompatibility can cause it to be totally unusable (e.g., will crash the system).
Games I actually think are in the category of least problematic software, because all they really care about is DirectX version, and here Vista and Win7 support the same thing. To date, I have not encountered a single game that would not run on Vista (even though many already don't run on XP). The chance of encountering a Vista-specific issue exists, but it's fairly minor. Still, if you rely on official support for your games, it's probably something to consider.