dr_st wrote:

PCBONEZ wrote:

I know enough about new MS OSs to not use them until they've been out a couple of years to let someone else figure out all the problems.
That would be called wisdom.

Vista was flaky POS when it was released and would have required upgrading my equipment.

Precisely.

A couple of years later it was a mature and stable OS, and has been ever since.

And irrelevant because 7 was out. (For which I did not have to replace hardware.).
Same a Windows ME when W2k came out.
So again Vista = Windows ME-II.

Sad to say, the only modern game I like to play is KSP. Leave Kak of Duty to the Bro-gamers.

shamino wrote:

it ended up not getting much more (if any more) support than WinXP

About 3 extra years of support over XP, although now we are towards the end of it, and it is the "extended" support phase, meaning you get only fixes. The one place where I think Vista got screwed over is not releasing IE10 and IE11 for it. IE9 is already old and there are many things it cannot do. So users on Vista have to use third party browsers. Ironically, you would think it would bother Microsoft somewhat, but apparently their support cycles are very rigid, and IE10 cannot be added to Vista since it was released after it left 'mainstream' support.

shamino wrote:

so I don't think there's much it can do that XP can't do

Try MSI interrupts. Hybrid sleep. NTFS symbolic link support. Support for advanced format (4K sector hard drives), although for some reason you had to go through a mini-hell to install the relevant patch.

Try not locking up randomly for 30 freaking seconds after you press a shortcut key to activate an item on the desktop.

You could find many more if you just go through feature lists, but what I mentioned above are things that I actually use myself and found important to me personally.

shamino wrote:

I've never played a DirectX 10 game, but from what I gather, DX10 was underwhelming.

Vista supports DX11.

shamino wrote:

As an XP user I've started noticing some modern games that don't support XP, but those almost always have Win7 as the minimum requirement. Very few are satisfied with Vista. I think the same is true with non-game software.

I don't think there is any game that will run on Win7 but not on Vista, unless it was specifically coded to check the OS version and refuse to run. I don't think I ever encountered such a game. Most games will list Win7 as a minimum requirement, because they don't think anyone uses Vista, or they forgot it exists, or they just didn't bother to play test it, and don't want to commit to support, in which case it will still run 99% of the time, since there is very little that Win7 can do and Vista cannot, which could be relevant to games.

The same is true about a lot of general purpose software as well. Vista is a lot closer to Win7 than to XP. Technically, Win7 could just have been a service pack for Vista. The differences between the cores are smaller than between any two OSs in the NT line, probably. Microsoft needed to brand it a new release, because the Vista name was tarnished beyond salvation. And why not make some $$$ in the process?

shamino wrote:

I think Vista ends up being mostly irrelevant from a compatibility standpoint, much like WinMe and Win2k are. (I like Win2k, but XP runs the same stuff and a lot that Win2k won't). I can see myself having a Win7 machine someday, but Vista will probably be ignored.

That is correct. There is no reason to bother with fresh Vista installs, since Win7 is pretty much the same (compatibility-wise and UI-wise) but slightly better.

PCBONEZ wrote:

And irrelevant because 7 was out. (For which I did not have to replace hardware.).

7 was not out yet. There was a gap of about a year between Vista's maturity and 7's general availability.

Any old hardware that can handle Win7 can handle Vista, except you may need to tweak it a bit out of the box.

PCBONEZ wrote:

Same a Windows ME when W2k came out.

You are forgetting details. Win2K came about half a year before WinME. 2K was not the solution to the problems of ME. They were parallel product lines back then. It's possible you are thinking about XP, which made ME irrelevant. I tend to agree.

WinXP was released about a year after WinME. Win7 was released more than 2.5 years after Vista. This difference was significant enough for MS to put a lot of extra work into Vista, and improve it to the point of being a very good OS.

PCBONEZ wrote:

So again Vista = Windows ME-II.

Depends on the aspect. You are only right when it comes to commercial success. Windows Vista, despite its early shortcomings, in the end (and that "end" was about 1-1.5 years after the initial release) turned out to be a good OS. Don't argue with this, because you will just be wrong. Did Windows ME ever become a good OS, technically?

The real difference between Windows Vista (with all its service packs, updates, and patches up until release of Windows 7), and release version of Windows 7, is quite small.

And actually, Vista has been receiving major patches and updates after the release of Win7 as well. Microsoft gives each OS 5 years of mainstream support, during which it will introduce new features. With about 2.5 years between Vista and 7, Vista was still in that phase when 7 came out. For example, Vista SP2 came out some months after Win7 did, and the Platform Update a few months later yet again.

Stiletto wrote:

The real difference between Windows Vista (with all its service packs, updates, and patches up until release of Windows 7), and release version of Windows 7, is quite small.

That's the ideal. if Vista had been equal to XP at time of release, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

shamino wrote:

As an XP user I've started noticing some modern games that don't support XP, but those almost always have Win7 as the minimum requirement. Very few are satisfied with Vista. I think the same is true with non-game software.

Yes. Even Microsoft's flagship products like Office and Visual Studio skipped Vista as a minimum requirement.

On the other side, recent Visual Studio versions compile programs that require Vista by default. So I think there may be some programs or games that officially need Win7, but run also on Vista - simply because many people seem to forget that Vista ever existed.

I don't think Vista was a bad OS, with all the updates it's not far from 7. And I actually do have a mobo (D201GLY2A) that runs Vista fine, but has driver problems with 7 and 8.

Azarien wrote:

Yes. Even Microsoft's flagship products like Office and Visual Studio skipped Vista as a minimum requirement. […]
Show full quote

shamino wrote:

As an XP user I've started noticing some modern games that don't support XP, but those almost always have Win7 as the minimum requirement. Very few are satisfied with Vista. I think the same is true with non-game software.

Yes. Even Microsoft's flagship products like Office and Visual Studio skipped Vista as a minimum requirement.

On the other side, recent Visual Studio versions compile programs that require Vista by default. So I think there may be some programs or games that officially need Win7, but run also on Vista - simply because many people seem to forget that Vista ever existed.

I don't think Vista was a bad OS, with all the updates it's not far from 7. And I actually do have a mobo (D201GLY2A) that runs Vista fine, but has driver problems with 7 and 8.

Have you tried to update its BIOS? Had a bizarre problem yesterday with a 775 board - Windows device manager was pointing out that the chipset's device (using prebuilt drivers) wasn't working (can't remember the diagnose message). Updated the BIOS to the "current" one and it was solved instantly (and setup/overall board performance got much better).

dr_st wrote:

shamino wrote:

it ended up not getting much more (if any more) support than WinXP

About 3 extra years of support over XP, although now we are towards the end of it, and it is the "extended" support phase, meaning you get only fixes.

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. XP and 7 both have more of a purpose IMO.
The MS patches for the OS don't interest me as much, since they would generally just be fixing stuff I don't care about or that also works on XP, so it's not a big differentiator. Some people might worry more than I do about security patches though.

shamino wrote:

so I don't think there's much it can do that XP can't do

Try MSI interrupts.

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. But if this feature becomes mandatory on future (or current) expansion card hardware, then at least in theory maybe Vista would be able to keep working with those cards when XP no longer can - if Vista drivers actually get written.

Hybrid sleep.

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.

NTFS symbolic link support.

Did they finally add real symlinks? Older versions of NT had I think 3 different forms of semi-symlink'ish constructs but none were as seamless or useful as a unix style symlink.

Support for advanced format (4K sector hard drives), although for some reason you had to go through a mini-hell to install the relevant patch.

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.

For my AF 512e drives, I just use a recent bootable linux disc/flashdrive to make properly aligned partitions, then reboot to XP to format them. It's an extra step, but since adding drives is a rare event it's only a minor inconvenience. I'd probably end up doing the same with Vista.

Try not locking up randomly for 30 freaking seconds after you press a shortcut key to activate an item on the desktop.

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.

You could find many more if you just go through feature lists, but what I mentioned above are things that I actually use myself and found important to me personally.

I'm sure they added various features, and some of it might be nice improvements, but in terms of usefulness for a retro PC application, it seems limited to much of the same software support as XP. For the most part, software support seems to have jumped from XP to 7.

Vista supports DX11. […]
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Vista supports DX11.

shamino wrote:

As an XP user I've started noticing some modern games that don't support XP, but those almost always have Win7 as the minimum requirement. Very few are satisfied with Vista. I think the same is true with non-game software.

I don't think there is any game that will run on Win7 but not on Vista, unless it was specifically coded to check the OS version and refuse to run. I don't think I ever encountered such a game. Most games will list Win7 as a minimum requirement, because they don't think anyone uses Vista, or they forgot it exists, or they just didn't bother to play test it, and don't want to commit to support, in which case it will still run 99% of the time, since there is very little that Win7 can do and Vista cannot, which could be relevant to games.

The same is true about a lot of general purpose software as well. Vista is a lot closer to Win7 than to XP. Technically, Win7 could just have been a service pack for Vista. The differences between the cores are smaller than between any two OSs in the NT line, probably. Microsoft needed to brand it a new release, because the Vista name was tarnished beyond salvation. And why not make some $$$ in the process?

Interesting. I was browsing some newer games on Steam a while back and most stuff that didn't go back to XP said it required Win7. I think GoG lists things the same way. So I guess as a Vista user, you can buy these games and hope they work, but if they don't, nobody will fix the problem no matter how minor the cause likely is? Sounds like an annoying situation. I guess searching internet forum posts before buying a game would help avoid problems though.

So in actual practice, maybe Vista can run much of the same things as 7, but it won't be officially supported and could have occasional breakage that won't get fixed. Meanwhile, a lot of stuff from older times that worked fine on XP started giving people headaches on Vista. Vista just seems to be in No Man's Land stuck between the much better supported XP and 7 releases.

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:

Try MSI interrupts.

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:

Hybrid sleep.

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.

clueless1 wrote:

With that in mind, do you think you will ever build a Win7 retro PC?

I think I won't have to *build* it, I have it. I've decided to stop upgrading my current main PC, bought in 2007, and I'll buy a new one.
The old one (Core 2 Quad, Radeon HD5770, 4 GB RAM, Win7+WinXP) will be preserved as a "retro" machine.

In a way it is a "bridge" between PC's of the 90's (LPT & COM ports, floppy drive, PATA) and contemporary PC's (SATA, USB 3.0).