You know, Windows Vista got a ton of crap, especially from me, but honestly, it wasn't *that* bad if you ran it on the proper hardware. The biggest blunder was manufacturers putting it on terrible hardware, or claiming computers would support/upgrade to Vista when that wasn't the case.
Anyways, all of this is to say that I decided to bring out another old laptop that was handed down to me that ran Vista originally, and I put Vista back on it, and.... I actually kinda like Vista's visual design and some of its other things :D
Granted, I am on Service Pack 2, so I imagine the original release was significantly worse.
8 months ago
@astroseneca I just switched my Vista install to Windows XP 64-bit, and it runs significantly faster, lol. I have never experienced the 64-bit version of Win XP, so it's cool to experiment with it now. 路 8 months ago
@jsreed5 I guess all of this is to really say that the change was only rapid for the people who could get new computers at the time, lol. My family had 3 main computers, afaik, that all ran Windows Vista, and one older Dell Windows XP (32-bit) tower that I spent a long time on, and broke, lol. I believe it was a Dell Dimension. After I broke it, I switched to older Windows 98 and Windows 2000 towers that were handed down to us from other people, so that's how I got to experience those Operating Systems. One of them was an eMachines and one was a Gateway. I was the only one who used those though; I liked tinkering with old computers as a kid. 路 8 months ago
@jsreed5 Certainly, the situation at school was different. I don't recall using Windows Vista at all at school, but I did for a long time at home. I wouldn't be surprised if schools stayed with XP and then jumped to Windows 7 and skipped Vista. By the time of 2009, I was in middle school and using Windows 7 on their computers at the school. I don't recall using computers a lot in elementary school (which was prior to 2009), only rarely, but I *know* that I started doing programming while still in elementary school, around 4th grade or so, because I have this distinct memory of giving a presentation to the class teaching html, lol. 路 8 months ago
@jsreed5 Sure. By the time my family got a Windows 7 PC, Windows 8 was already starting to be a thing, iirc. I was very excited about Windows 7 when it came out, but we only had Win. 7 when we got laptops to take home from high school, which was around 2012-2013, so several years after Windows 7 initially came out. Otherwise, I only experienced Win. 7 at school or on my grandmas computer. I actually remember telling my grandma about all of the cool features Windows 7 added, and wrote up this big Word document teaching her things, lol.
So from 2009 to 2012 I was mostly still on Windows Vista on my home computers, as far as I can remember. 路 8 months ago
The biggest issues I experienced with Vista were stability and compatibility problems. So much was changed with the kernel and system libraries, one could never guarantee one's favorite or mission critical program could run at all--or cause a kernel panic if it did. Things did get better by SP2, but Windows 7 came out only three months later, and the switch was rapid once everyone saw how much 7 was improved. 路 8 months ago
Nothing compares to the indestructible Windows XP Pro x64, which I had on my main computer for a long time and where I personally integrated drivers to support AHCI. 路 8 months ago
I vaguely remember Vista getting better after SP2, but that was aeons ago for me now. 路 8 months ago