Giving Windows Vista a Second Chance
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- Опубліковано 28 тра 2024
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Windows Vista is often regarded as the WORST version of Windows ever released, but was it really that bad?! I give Vista a try again 15 years later in 2022 and see how well it has held up.
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▬ Contents of this video ▬
00:00 - Windows Vista History
04:32 - Installing Windows Vista Ultimate
06:32 - Squarespace Sponsor Slot
07:29 - Windows Vista Tour & Aero Interface
09:17 - Dreamscene
10:00 - Windows Vista Sidebar
11:03 - Instant Search
11:30 - UAC
12:06 - Readyboost
12:31 - Windows Defender
12:52 - Windows Experience Rating
13:31 - Windows Media Centre
14:06 - Conclusion
Sources used in this video (with permission or under fair use):
Windows Vista Commercial - The "Wow" starts now.: • Windows Vista Commerci...
The Mojave Experiment: • The Mojave Experiment
#Windows #WindowsVista #RetroComputing - Наука та технологія
I totally agree that the Vista visuals are beautiful. It's aged very well too. Still looks modern to me. Even Windows 11 feels like many steps back when it comes to visuals and animations compared to Vista. The 3D Win+Tab view is a work of art.
Vista (and thus Win7) really looked like a perfected version of the “sleek” look XP had. More modern Windows OSes are REALLY afraid of having colourful or “3D looking” buttons, everything is bland, flat colours.. just totally uninspiring.
That whole era was something to behold. Vista/7 were the best looking Windows versions out of the box, and (Snow) Leopard (which I believe came out soon after Vista) was definitely the best looking OS X version. Compiz was also up and coming in the Linux world as well, and that went all the way from tasteful, feature-rich accelerated desktop to wild wobbly window showcase.
Everything nowadays feels so flat and sterile. From a usability perspective it's all fine-better in some ways-but meh. I miss the bold visuals.
Vista had a pretty beautiful interface which was a hundred times better than than the interface for Windows 8 and every version after that. I always enjoyed using it, could never understand the hate
i fucking hate the windows 8/ UI … Vista and 7 looked even much frendlier
@@misatosfootpic 💯
Vista will probably remain my favorite Windows OS ever. The amount of excitement I had to get it back in those days is unmatched. It's extremely underrated because it mostly ran on hardware that couldn't handle it at the time. When I got it on my first PC it ran like garbage, and I was very disappointed, but as soon as I got to experience it on good hardware, I absolutely loved it. I also miss aero glass so much.
We need Aero Glass back!
Tried imitating Aero with Stardock Curtains, which's like a minimalistic alternative to WindowBlinds. Best I could do is simple semi-transparent title bars and borders. You could make the rest of the window semi-transparent and you'd get blurring for that, but you can't get blurring for the title bars and borders.
Visata kept me in bussines as free lance computer tech that OS would eat hard drives cause it Ran them all time these was brand new PCS too
@@BeautifulAngelBlossom Do you have a figure on how many actual hard drives Vista directly killed? Also, were these those crappy Maxtor hard drives or works, the IBM deathstars?
Run aero10
The ecosystem not being ready was one of the issues with Vista. Hardware manufacturers weren’t all in, an a lot of sound cards, graphics cards, etc. did not have proper drivers for users at time of launch. Many branded computers too. Default drivers did what this could, but left users with a slow, buggy experience. However, Vista had its faults too, notably networking. Before the first service pack, file transfers over networks were essentially a no go. Opening a simple Excel document from a shared folder led to a time out error, more often than not. Service Packs really helped over time, but damage was done; especially with Macs becoming more popular thanks to iPods, iPhones and Intel processors…
The thing that really fixed Vista was disabling the sidebar and restarting. The sidebar had a memory leak that caused the poor performance
Bloatware was a big problem as well. In the mid 2000s if you bought a new PC, it came loaded with so many trial programs that did things the operating system already did, and were difficult to remove. Less tech-savvy people wouldn't have even known to remove them. This considerably slowed down XP, but when OEMs added that garbage to Vista on hardware that barely met the minimum requirements, it was pretty much unusable.
8:08 Although I do remember, that Windows 7 had in its release notes that it further put more load onto the GPU in rendering the Aero UI, so Vista as the first version to introduce it probably didn't yet do it most optimally.
That is correct. Vista introduced a new display driver model (WDDM). But it wasn't fully complete, and some parts of the classic UI acceleration were not GPU-accelerated yet, so they were rendered on the CPU. The GPU did all the compositing and the transparency effects and all that.
Windows 7 added the UI acceleration back in, but in practice it didn't make much of a difference. The Aero UI never had to redraw UI elements the way XP and earlier versions had to, because Aero did the compositing on the GPU. So each window was drawn into a separate texture in memory, and the GPU would use hardware acceleration to draw them.
XP and earlier literally drew the windows on top of eachother directly in memory, so only the topmost window's contents were preserved. This meant that when you dragged windows around, it had to redraw all the time, where Aero didn't have to do anything with the UI elements, as the textures weren't overwritten.
Aside from that, the CPUs had become so fast that they drew the UI in software really quickly anyway.
So yes, if you ran some 2D UI benchmark, you could measure that Windows 7 was faster because of the acceleration. But in daily use, you'd rarely notice the difference.
Despite the rage, these were the golden moments of my life. I remember installing Vista, staying on top of the windows games, playing games, learning photoshop, Dreamweaver and what not. Pirating games. Oh the memories.
Oh my gawd, Windows media centre. That thing was SooOOOo cool back in the day
The problem with UAC in Vista was a lot of programs written for XP would request administrator privileges every time they needed to do something, and then discard the handle to those privileges when they were done. As a worst case scenario, imagine a program copying some files to a restricted folder, and every time it finishes a file, it gives up its privileges, and has to ask for them again for the next one. The big issue with UAC was how legacy software interacted with the API, and how UAC handled these legacy programs. Not much actually had to happen in terms of "decreasing the sensitivitiy," UAC today is almost the same as it was in Vista.
You can blame third party software developers for not following Microsoft's guidelines. There is software TO THIS DAY that requires UAC to be off, we're talking a medical ERM system, I won't name names. It does require a domain with a windows server and active directory just to run it too, WITH UAC OFF.
I found the best solution to make the Vista UAC less annoying was to disable UAC-secure-Desktop, so that the UAC window is just a regular window without interrupting the work flow, just like every other "Do you want to save your changes"-Popup. It's a good hidden setting within gpedit tho, with Home Editions you needed to change the registry to achieve that.
If there is some annoyance with any kind of software i always try to find a solution for it instead of just giving up on it on the spot, like so many people obviously did with Vista. And every Windows version always had some annoyances.
XP had those yellow taskbar bubbles with sound, Windows 7 removed the option to use the classic context menu for applications on the task bar and also had no option to disable the mousehover-previews - and don't even get me started on Windows 8's war on the classic desktop. With Windows 8 the annoyances got too much for me personally, hence why i switched to a macOS and Linux co-existence.
But up to that point all the specific annoyances of all Windows versions were manageable if you know where to find the right tweaks, Vista was no exception. People were simply too lazy to bother with that, but i can understand it somehow.
No one wants the need to "tame" an operating system before it becomes usable, which is also why modern Windows is losing market share. Especially with the introduction of Windows 11 - in my opinion far more annoying and intrusive than default Vista ever was, just look at the shenanigans they do with their Edge-Browser.
I just remember that it was very resource-hungry compared to XP. Even with 4 GB of ram everything(games) seemed to run worse.
"everything (games)"
Yep! It looked great and had some great features. But even on my gaming beast (I had disposable income back then) it ran... Not great.
@@wordart_guian yes that's the real purpose of computers, for games!
even windows 11 runs ok on 3gb ram. windows vista was truly an unoptimized piece of garbage.
@@dolbyprologicii do you seriously believe 11 on 3gb runs better than vista on 2?
Vista on 2gb ran comparably to 10 on 8gb.
I loved Vista.
My first experience of windows at home.
The reason being I was an Amiga boy.
Then after leaving school I discovered pubs and raves.
It started to become apparent, that I needed more and more to be hooked up to the internet, so took the plunge and spent £700 on a laptop with Vista.
It met the specs, and to be honest, worked like a dream.
Didn't take me long to become familiar with it as I am a natural born tinkerer.
Was soon emulating the Amiga alongside all sorts of other consoles, and quickly became I.T support for all my friends and family.
A bane to this day haha.
I loved Vista. It was such a big evolution of Windows I have never seen before and never seen again.
👍
Win 7 just perfected it though, pretty much made Vista obsolete the day it was released.
@@DoomKid Except it didn't. Sure it had some optimizations, but I ran my Vista machine for as long as it lasted, with zero reason to switch to Win7. Plus Win7 did something with navigation that I took a long while to adjust to.
I'd argue that the upgrade from Windows 3.1x to 95, or from Windows 9x to XP was a more significant evolution than XP to Vista.
@@DoomKid that was mostly because of the bad rumor vista got in the beginning but I honestly preferred it over win7 and would run it today if I could pick any version of windows I wanted with full driver support if only for the quick launch alone
win7 felt like what vista home edition should be like, instead of giving us win7 they should have just optimized vista further IMO
win7 is basically just vista but with slightly less quality of life.
Vista served me well for many years, even with a rather underpowered PC. Still probably my favorite OS ever, really a huge shame it got ragged on so hard, it deserved so much better. :(
Back when I was a kid, we had a shared laptop with Vista on it, and I thought it was really cool. I never really understood why people hated it so much considering it worked just fine for me, but then again, it _was_ a pretty beefy laptop for the time, and if I remember correctly, we might have gotten it at a point where the driver situation had improved somewhat.
Great video, Dan. This is an underrated OS in my opinion.
Launch Vista was deserving of the hate, SP3 Vista however was fine it was pretty much Windows 7 but without the QOL additions.
I loved vista so much, maybe it's because I got my first i7 at the same time but heck it was beautiful.
@@mrcyberpunk there was no sp3. and tbf, even RTM vista was about comparable to W7 (even better at times) when ran on a 2008 PC (this is what I used)
underrated OS it the worst
@@BeautifulAngelBlossom what is that supposed to mean
I recently installed Vista Ultimate on an old PC. I was curious about the OS since I had never really used it having gone from XP to 7. I think it's great! Gorgeous visuals and options that are no longer available. Too bad it has such a bad reputation as I truly enjoy this operating system. Great to see a positive review on this misunderstood and maligned version of Windows!
Totally agree,and I think Windows 8,although not pretty like Vista,got an undeserved bad reputation too.I still use Windows 8 on my second computer.I consider it to be fast and stable.
@@davidr.wilson8194 Windows 8/8.1 is pretty light for old computers not gonna lie.
*I never hated vista or remember having many problems with it. Seeing it here again, I forgot how amazing it looks!* 👍💪
I have a soft spot for vista as it was my first OS on a laptop which was entirely my own, not a family PC. It always worked fine for me. The laptop came with vista pre-installed so it was built for it.
I think windows vista is the operating system equivalent of well aged wine, when it first came out it seemed pointless and worse than the prior system, but now, in today's age, when you crack open the bottle that is windows vista, you're met with a surprisingly wonderful experience.
The biggest problem with Vista was Microsoft telling OEMs that they were no longer allowed to sell XP, so lots of budget machines intended for XP were reused for Vista.
It was common to buy a new Visa laptop with only 256 or 512MB RAM, which meant that Vista was constantly accessing the drive for virtual RAM.
I remember installing Nero on someones new Vista laptop, and it taking over 40 minutes to complete.
With the default security and UAC settings it took the first 20 mins just checking the files before asking if I wanted to let the installer do its job.
In 2008, the company I was working for made the decision to stay with Windows XP, rather than go with Vista. The computer I was using for XP, and most of the computers in my company was a Pentium 200 with 128 MB RAM. There lies the problem at the time. At the same time I bought a new Laptop, a Toshiba A215, AMD x64 1.9 GHz, Duo Core, with 2 GB of RAM. That version of Vista, Home Premium, bundled with that Laptop was what I used for years. I updated the A215 to 4 GB, bought a couple more for nothing on Ebay, and still use it today. Microsoft Windows 7 and above do NOT work very well with that particular Laptops, and it has to do with Drivers. The only other Operating System I have found that works very well on these laptops is Lubuntu 18.04 LTS, and I have tried them all. What I have found to work the best is a Duo Boot Windows Vista Home Premium, (the one that came with the Laptop, has the Drivers), and Lubuntu 18.04 LTS, though I like Zorin it is a bit too slow on boot up time.
For all the harsh words about Vista, the actual Sales of Vista, and the number of Users was very successful, despite the accusations, that were based on, as you stated, inadequate Hardware. Oh, in case you were wondering, use MyPal as the Browser for Vista, UA-cam is too slow though, and yes, I am typing this on a HP i3 11th Generation, 8 GB, 256 SSD, 1080 Resolution, I got for a cheap price from Best Buy, (same one is selling right now at Costco for even lower). Super Laptop!
Vista also came out right before the great recession panic of late 2007/2008. The very last thing companies wanted to do was spend money replacing perfectly good working computers when they were trying to figure out who not lay off and how to keep the lights on
I just realized I literally had your same laptop lol. I had no issues with the drivers nor BSOD. I ran World of warcraft on it back in the day fine and Office for school work. Windows 7 worked much better on it. I did upgrade the latest bios on my Toshiba. The default 80 gig hard drive was crap and slow which I upgraded to a 7200 rpm that was 320 gig which made a difference but still slow on Vista but worked. Fedora 13 worked great on this unit as well as Win 7
Never had any issues on my machine back in the day on day 1. You've pretty much said it already..The bad rep was from the poor driver support at the start, and people on less than ideal machines. By SP2 it was fine.
I still have Vista Premium on an old Mesh laptop that originally came with XP. Obviously this isn't connected to the internet. It's used for compatibility with old hardware and software. I always loved the Aero glass interface. Translucency is something I always go for in Linux desktop environments. I never had the problems that I kept hearing others were having with it.
I loved Vista and used it extensively. I still do on occasion, using a Sony VAIO FZ laptop for downloading digital video from my MiniDV camcorder. The Vaio had a useful mini FireWire port that allows me to plug in the camcorder. Transferring the footage at full resolution is easy and largely automatic in Vista. Great video - more please!
Now do Windows 8.1, my personal favorite due to performance and lack of spyware compared to 10 and 11.
telemetry reporting was introduced into 8.1 a long ago
u need 10 ltsc
@@tribemaster101 I myself use that
Windows 10 and 11 don't have Spyware
@@fffUUUUUU they added that telemety in Windows 7 too
Loved this OS and never had any issues in the day, looked absolutely gorgeous too :)
I actually had more problems with Win XP than with Vista. Ran smooth like butter for me.
Same. I got XP to bluescreen multiple times, but can't actually remember if that happened ever on Vista 🤔
@Ed Straker To a point fair statement there. Though in my opinion XP began to got stable just around SP2.
I had used Windows 98 then i got my own pc with a graphics card and xp ran like crap and was the worst ever for me
Then i remember downloading vista and the whole journey from the start was awesome
Vista ultimate is awesome, the aero, gadgets, graphics, stability, media, just was a great home pc os
Win 7 was basic like win 95
Win 8 was just awefull and killed hdds
Win 10 is actually good and stable except for the user tracking
@Dan Woods Thanks a lot for mentioning Snappy Driver! I've got a Surface Pro engineering sample that has started to fall apart as far as functionality goes and no drivers to be found... Until now! Installing now and I hope my camera, Surface Pen, Windows Hello start working again!
One big issue for Vista was that many people were still running Pentium 4s which pretty much stagnated starting in 2003. it runs flawlessly on any kind of Core processor. Remember that it’s a pain to run Win95 on any kind of slower 486 which were still sold in the early 90s but back then due to fast technological improvement of chips it was pretty much expected that you update your hardware first in order to run the newest software. People including Microsoft expected this trend to continue so that by mid 2006 processors north of 5ghz would be common but we all know how that turned out so Intel was forced to scrap Netburst and revive the P6 architecture still used in mobile processors. So because of the long development cycle of Vista (including resets and all) and stagnating processor performance in the early to mid 2000s, when Vista was eventually released to the public, it had to deal with underpowered systems, missing drivers for old hardware and peripherals of companies that might have not existed anymore and of course incompatible software (Vista is quite different from XP after all). Because of all these initial problems the “Vista bad xD“ meme took off and thus a really interesting and innovative operating system became an object of ridicule and delegated to the dustbin of computer history.
Windows 11 still uses aero visual effects. It's just missing the nice UI graphics from the default theme in windows vista and 7.
Still not as many. It still uses some aero animations like minimizing windows, but many aero effects are lost. Like Aero Peek for Windows 7 and ofc the glass transparency. Thats more than just some textures from themes.
I quite liked Vista but I had a fairly modern PC, I seem to remember it used a lot of memory but the real negative was heavy disk usage, I think it was the superfetch service that kept cataloguing files all the time that really slowed things down but you could disable it but a lot of people just didn't know about it. This was really before SSDs were commonplace, I had two of those fancy Western Digital Raptor hard drives in RAID 0 at the time which made a huge difference.
Those raptors with a huge heat sink were the ones to get. The noise of 2 of those spinning up at startup and loading windows can never be replicated.
I had the raptor drives to, into raid 0, it works great
I think using sleep mode is a more viable way to mitigate the slowdown caused by superfetch at a cold startup. Your comptuer running at full speed(ish) immediately, does not compare to the performance of a properly cached superfetch.
I kept selling Windows XP and probably only sold about a dozen Vista machines during it's lifetime (compared to hundreds of XP Machines).
The way I saw it, the software was about 3 years ahead of where the Hardware was. It really needed a Dual Core with 4 or 8 Gigs of RAM and a dedicated graphics card to even be tolerable to run, and very few machines were sold with anything close to that power.
The poor people who tried to run it with 1 GB of RAM were just out of luck.
Windows Vista was great, in my opinion. I remember obsessing over the recommended specs, and purchasing a Toshiba laptop to meet those requirements before the launch. First day I could, I upgraded, going straight to ultimate edition. I was really big into windows customization using window blinds and shell replacements, but when Vista came out, Windows had finally become good enough on its own for me.
I loved vista, I was running Dell workstation at the time, had a fuel boot between Vista and XP. Vista worked no issues and xp kept freezing.
I remember vista needed a bios update or the license would expire after 30 days.
Thanx for the video. I only saw where I worked one laptop with Vista. MS pushing new hardware requirements on Vista seems to be repeated today on Win 11
I had a gamer-grade PC in 2006, so Vista ran really well.
It was so much more modern-feeling than Windows XP.
I have only fond memories of the OS.
Same here. But people bought laptops with intel GME 945 and what, 256 ram? Christ, XP barely runs on that. And this was on the edge of Internet exploding, browsers probably ate twice that RAM for just basic stuff.
I remember my brother upgrading to Vista, and he found it annoying and slow until later updates, and he warned me not to bother with it, although I think he did like the aesthetics of Vista and got along with it better once it improved (oh, and I have to admit the way you could switch between windows with Alt-W etc. was a great feature). We had desktops, essentially purely for gaming, though they wouldn't have been top of the range gaming PCs. I can see why some people liked the Vista aesthetics, they certainly looked more modern and fancy, but I preferred the older style of XP and still do, and so was never tempted to go for Vista. I also preferred the aesthetics of Windows 7 (which I did switch to when it arrived), even though as Dan Wood says it was very similar to later versions of Vista under the hood.
Vista eventually became excellent, as you clearly point out. However, it had some major issues at launch which I'm sure didn't help its reputation.
First of all, it had some serious problems with device drivers. A lot of older stuff just wouldn't work, and many people were really upset about that. I should know, I worked tech support at a large PC company at the time. ;)
Secondly, Vista ran well on new & modern hardware, but not so-much on old PCs. Particularly the ones without a discrete graphics card, which were pretty much the norm back then.
Vista also had a boatload of compatibility problems with old software, not just hardware. Lots of this was fixed over time, but it did upset quite a few people I talked to. Service Pack 1 fixed a lot of things, but the time from launch to SP1 were pretty shaky for many users.
Personally I quite liked it, and still do. When it morphed into Windows 7 I was a happy user, and overall 7 is probably the best iteration of Windows yet. It just worked, and very well too.
Anyway, great video, I enjoyed it. Cheers Dan. :)
15:20 As far as I understand the situation though, it wasn't just a marketing move though. Windows 7 isn't just a rebranded Vista, because plenty of development was put into it to merit a fresh version. Looking at the first RTM build number of 7600 versus the ladt Vista build number should validate this hypothesis.
For that matter, Windows 11 actually is more or a rebranded Windows 10 update, with some of the features of the scrapped Windows 10 variants slipped into it. It even still identifies itself as Windows 10 in things like the Remote Desktop diagnostics and in a few other places. It's probably also a symptom of Microsoft having done a rolling release of 10 for so long, that 11 doesn't really differ from 10 that much. The remaining mentions of 10 in 11 however betrays its nature. The NT version hasn't even increased by a major number, still identifying as 10.xxx
Unlike Vista to 7, which was a jump from 6.0 to 6.1
6.0 to 6.1 vs 10.x to 10.x seems like a non argument
I'm glad you mentioned the 'Vista Capable' saga, that was definitely one of the biggest issues. It came out around the start of a global recession. Everyone was either hanging on too or buying (crappy) low spec hardware, which simply couldn't handle Windows Vista. It was a time when netbooks (usually with Intel's POS Atom processors) were flying off the shelves and nobody wanted to spend more than £500 on a laptop, so they normally ended up with Celeron or Duron based systems with 1GB of memory or more often LESS lol.
I think I had a Core 2 with 4GB of memory at the time, and Vista ran perfectly. Finally a 64-bit Windows OS with decent driver and application support. New DirectX. Disable UAC and she's good to go! I never looked back and ran it on all my systems until Windows 7 dropped. It definitely wasn't THE or even one of the worst Microsoft OS's, not by a long shot.
Excellent content as always 🤓👍
Vista Home Premium was my first OS and in my first computer, an HP Pavilion Media Center m8200n. Loved that it had a TV tuner card too. It only came with 3GB of RAM and made windows' monthly updates very difficult but after many failed attempts and restarts the updates would eventually install and my gaming experience was usually very good. Definitely do miss the Aero Glass feature.
I used Vista at work all the way up until Win 7 was released. The biggest problem was performance. It ran best when you disabled all the fancy transparent desktop features, but still it wasn't great, and very often you'd get the white screen under load and it would just sit there for 30 seconds before you could continue.
Nope, disabling aero actually made things worse (because desktop composition was a part of aero, raymond chen had an article about that). It was essentially an urban legend
I disabled aero once and it was fun to experiment with classic but i noticed things were much worse so i went back to aero
@@wordart_guian I worked at Microsoft as a lead dev at the time. We had to use Vista for years. Trust me, disabling aero did speed up the OS no matter how fast a graphics card you had in your machine.
@@TheStuffMade i mean my source was also a lead dev at microsoft
The article is named “Adjust visual effects for best performance” should really be called “Adjust visual effects for crappiest appearance”
@@wordart_guian I thought your source was "one time I tried disabling aero and it felt worse on my pc". but I see you rewrote your reply. I think we're going to need a source. I'm talking 1st hand experience here with a whole team of devs. You're talking 2nd hand information based on something you say some guy wrote that might or might not have any connection to Microsoft. Did you know that once Win 7 work started all maintenance of Vista was moved to a B team in China?. Perhaps your Chen guy was part of that team?
@@TheStuffMade "that might or might not have any connection to Microsoft" it's litterally raymond chen
he's not just some guy
IMHO Vista was only good when you disabled the UAC mess, reduced disc access, and disabled the AERO theme to speed it up, but you are right so many computers were sold as "VISTA READY" when they could barely run XP, and that killed a lot of goodwill for Vista, but Win 7 righted a lot of Vista's wrongs, and IMHO was the last good Windows OS, and what let me to switch to Linux using Solus Linux w/Budgie DE as my main distro these days.
Was UAC new with Vista? I feel like it might be one of the core hatred for vista dislikes back in the day but I don't recall exactly
@@blu3_enjoy Yes is was new with Vista, and it was one of the core hated features of Vista, as many less tech savvy users would get freaked out by it popping up all the time thinking something was wrong with their computers, outside of it just being freaking annoying!!
Also I've lived in a semi rural town most of my life, and I'm known as the electronics fix it guy, and during the Vista era I made a nice little side business debloating Vista, and doing system upgrades to make it run better, and still have a few customers who will send me their computers when something major goes wrong, but I've since moved a lot of them onto Chrome OS, and Solus Linux for the daily compute needs, and those major go wrongs have gone way down, which is good for them, but when I think about it, it is kind of bad for business 😅
Aero being activated actually sped up the computer (because of desktop composition). Desactivating was more of an urban legend.
About uac: a necessary evil. There are very few people who were qualified enough to disable it/still browse safely without it
@@wordart_guian Aero use more system ram on lower end desktops, and laptops that did not have a dedicated GPU with it's own ram, and used an onboard iGPU that was usually very weak, so yeah disabling Aero did speed up many computers by freeing up some of the system ram Aero used for the effects, and I found a lot of my customers hated the look of Aero, and preferred the classic look.
@@CommodoreFan64 the article i read is “Adjust visual effects for best performance” should really be called “Adjust visual effects for crappiest appearance”
Vista Ultimate had a lot of experimental features that I always wished Microsoft kept. I’m using gadgets and dreamscene even on Windows 11.
If you like Windows DreamScene, try Wallpaper Engine.
@@ebridgewater Cool thanks! I got around most of the quirks of dreamscne. I use ramdisk to store the video file and no compression.
I had an HP laptop which was bleeding edge in 2009 that I got for college.
It was as Core 2 Quad Q9000 and came with an, I believe, Realtek Wifi card which was only compatible with Vista+.
In 2009 Vista was so slow and unstable that I went without wireless connectivity to be able to be able to use XP instead.
Years later I'd upgrade it to 7 and everything worked perfectly.
I worked in IT support and saw numerous Vista-related issues from driver incompatibility to kernel-level issues.
RAM and CPU management was poor, the animations wasted laptop battery life, etc. etc. etc.
So yes, in my (educated) opinion, 2+ years after it came out it was still absolute garbage.
My memory of Vista is a family laptop that ran it decently well.
I still love the Aero theme, my current system has a Windows 7 install for that one game that does not run with Linux and happens to use DX11.
I'd try Vista if it wasn't limited to DX10 because I also like the look of it.
Currently my choice of theme is somewhere in between Windows 7 and 10 but brown with green accents.
By my standards either is significantly better than Windows 10 or especially 11.
Do you know DX11 was/is available as a regular Vista update? You can still get it in Microsofts Update Catalogue.
I had a brand new pc that i got just around the time vista came out, so i had no problem running it from the beginning and i really enjoyed it actually... The only problem with it from jump that i had was my scanner driver not working on it, but that wasn't a major setback as i didn't use it all that much.
For me, I grew up with computers ever since I was 4. Since then, my first computer (which was a family computer) was a Windows Vista VAIO. It was my favourite thing I owned (or we owned) until my father accidentally dropped it in the middle of the night when he had important work to do - this was when Vista had lost support, around 2016 (yes we still used this computer in 2016). It worked perfectly fine on this hardware, we didn't get any issues. I still want to experience this Aero theme since it's so nostalgic. Me being lucky to be born in 2010, I am grateful for it.
Tried Vista on my Athlon XP 3000 early on and I abandoned it and went back to XP. I loved the new look of vista, even though my gfx card wasn't enough to run Aero. But, I had hardware I used everyday that had no drivers for VIsta. The UAC annoyed the absolute hell out of me and the "breadcrumb" address bar in explorer really clashed with the long file and folder names I had my music collection organised into.
My Vista partition was left dormant for months until I got my Xbox 360. I then got a HDTV tuner card and used the Xbox as a Media Centre extender allowing me to pause and rewind live tv with the xbox controller. My snobby PS3-owning friends thought they were all top shit when the PS3 finally got the pause&rewind capability, but us 360 plebs had that functionality from the beginning.
I too love the glass aesthetic and I really liked the sidebar as well. I remember being disappointed when they stopped supporting it.
How do you get vista ultimate extras? The update server are down and the pack from the Web doesn't work well.
Spammer
I remember my parents bought a prebuilt desktop with vista on launch and it didn’t have any of that drivers needed for it’s own network card for at least a month or two
Jeez with all the flat and simple UI we have today, vista looks fancy… It could be an upgrade to what we have now
You mean you don’t love the flat, bland, boring look of Win10 onwards? lol
Was not expecting a video from you tonight, luckily I have a cold beer in my hand....you know where this is going by now.... Downloading your vid as I write this. 🤘😎👍
I personally didn't have much issues myself with Windows Vista. Even when I bought a prebuilt PC with a 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo cpu and 2 gb of ram and a 7600 GS graphics card. It came preinstalled with Windows Vista Home Premium and it ran fine even though this all was back in April of 2007 when I bought that PC.
Yeah, i remember upgrading to this and then having to turn back to xp because hardly any games ran, or crashing to desktop as no drivers was ready for that operating system! fun times.
I had an athlon XP for a loooong time. It was only fast enough for XP, and I upgraded in 2010 to a newer pc that ran Windows 7 (32 bit, since 2gb ram). Most people had a computer that was more of a Windows 98 computer with like 512mb ram....not good enough for vista!
Windows Vista was by far my favourite OS on the PC, seconded by Windows 2000 Advanced Server. I actually liked the request intrusions letting me know something wanted to gain extra permissions. The OS needed more powerful hardware sure but with a decent system it was absolutely fine. I really hated Win7 and still have Vista on a Sony Vaio P to this day and it runs fine.
why do u hate 7?
Why do you hate W7? It's almost the same as Vista but finetuned. Ultimately W7 was the last decent OS from Microsoft.
Great video!
I ran Windows Vista from 2008 until...well, long after the EOL date. Starting off with service pack 1, and upgrading to SP2 when it came out, it was absolutely a stable and very useful operating system!
I ran it on an Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 CPU, with 2gb of RAM like you.
Overall was a great experience, enough so that I couldn't justify paying for the upgrade to Windows 7 when it came out; although in hindsight, upgrading would have been better, just to have a supported OS for longer.
Back in 2008 I was using Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 Etch, which was doing all this and much more.
@@WizardNumberNext I didn't mention Linux, but in 2008 I was dual-booting between Slackware Linux and Windows Vista. I don't think I mentioned that since it was the Windows Vista experience that was more relevant to this video.
Still using Linux here, and actually using it a lot more now since it performs far, and I mean FAR, better on this older hardware. That was not-so-ironically one of the biggest complaints from Vista's early adopters.
I had a really good experience with Vista, although I was pretty late to the party as I upgraded in around 2010-2011 from an XP machine with an Athlon 64 3500+ single core to a machine that had a quad core Phenom 2 or something and IIRC 4GB of RAM, and Windows 7 was already out by then and so Vista had all the updates and service packs already on it (basically a hand-me-down from my father and didn't have a spare Win 7 license so I ran Vista)
I even have one of those "mini laptops" that were quite horrible to use and disappeared very quickly, running Vista because the diagnostic equipment for my car requires an old version of Windows and it's working quite well even though it's horribly underpowered compared to other machines around that time, though I suppose I'm not actually doing much on the machine apart from navigating the OS and running the diagnostic software. XP would've worked too but I have so many XP machines laying around that I wanted to do something different.
Really neat machine that I got for pennies from a flea market and it's about the only mid 2000s laptop that I have that has a working battery and doesn't weigh a million tons. But it would be god awful for productivity
Bugs glitches and it being way ahead of hardware of the time. I still love all of the design that went into it. If Vista came out nowadays instead of back then. I think it would've been a success. I know most of what is in Vista is in Win 7, but I still prefer the look and feel of a good working Vista machine. Imo much prettier, easier and nicer to use than Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and 11.
Windows Vista user interface is better than anything Microsoft came up with after windows 7.
Actually, a lot of Features in Windows 8, 10, and 11 are built-in features from Windows 7 and Vista.
Funny how upgrading a Windows 7 system to 10 didn't have the same noticeable performance loss as seen with XP to Vista. Microsoft learned their lesson really well. They even made sure that Windows 11 would perform just as well as Windows 10 on older systems, oh wait...
That is because Windows 10, 7 were had more in common with Vista than XP. MS really did rewrite sooo much code and subsystems and services to make them secure and modern. Recession was in the air so people and companies kept 10 year old computers and netbooks were all the rage back then too with their 1 gigs of ram and single core ATOM cpus. Windows 11 does run well on modern hardware BUT can not run virtualized memory for container apps which is where Win11 is heading due to lack of CPU support. They may run now but future versions will block them for security purposes.
In my experience the reputation Vista earned for itself mostly comes from it having been bundled with the majority of netbooks and nettop systems which were very popular at the time. You could go back to WinXP but the driver situation for the latest hardware would make you loose some integrated peripherals like a webcam or WIFI adapter. And buying a USB-bussed counterpart would offset the system's initial low price and small size.
Microsoft was just too persistent with stuffing Vista into everything that could barely run it.
I used Vista for years on a laptop that came with it preinstalled. It was nothing fancy: an Acer laptop with a pretty basic C2D CPU (the T5500 @1.66 Ghz) which cost like 700 (it was in the kind of range that would cost less than 600 bucks these days). 2GB RAM which I slightly upgraded to 3, but only a couple of years later. Discrete graphics, yes, but a barely 128 MB solution. Never gave me major headaches, and was indeed pretty good after SP1. The problem must have been of course Celeron laptops with the infamous intel GMA 9XX integrated graphics and similar crap and 1GB RAM (I even remember one or two models with Vista Basic and 512 MB!!) as well as even an HP VIA C7 CPU based NETBOOK!
I'm amazed this has only 7000 views. It definitely needs more.
My experience with Vista was pretty much the same as yours. I adopted it early on as I wanted to develop with DirectX 10. Initially the OS had some issues with stability and performance, but the service packs pretty much cleaned it up.
Other than that, drivers and applications weren't always mature enough (Vista was the first OS where applications were running without admin rights on standard consumer machines. Many applications were writing to parts of the filesystem or registry that only an admin could. They had to be updated to play by the Microsoft rules that had been around for ages).
And yes, by the time Windows 7 came out, most people had powerful enough hardware, so that wasn't an issue. Drivers also weren't an issue anymore. And applications played nice when not running as admin, so that was solved as well.
So Windows 7 was mostly clever marketing. People who didn't want to upgrade to Vista, would go to 7. But if you would have put them on Vista with all the updates, their experience would probably have been 99% the same.
'We're going to die'... Classic Moss. Thanks for another great video and taking one for the team Dan.
I remember that the first laptop i ever had was a second hand windows vista laptop
(Which was one my brother owned but he got a new one and so gave me his old one)
It was very slow to start up (i can’t remember exactly how long it took, but it was slower than the windows 7 laptop that i got for my 12th birthday back in 2012, the windows 7 laptop was brand new, and it took about as long as you would expect a laptop with a mechanical hard drive to start, and i would guess the vista laptop took at least twice as long, and i even discovered that it would start faster if i would put it into hibernation instead of shutting it down when not in use)
And there were a few glitches that the vista installation on that laptop had
Sometimes it would randomly announce that it couldn’t sign me in as it could not connect to something (I can’t remember the exact message due to it being over 10 years ago, but it was a rather strange message considering that the accounts were stored locally on the computer)
And even worse, is that my parents thought i was doing something to mess it up (when it was actually something to do with the laptop itself, apparently at one point it was taken to a computer shop, and the person there said that the hard drive was dying, which could explain why i have a few seeming random photos that are missing, there are gaps in the photo numbers, although since back then i was photo crazy, the photos most likely be ones taken inside the house of random things, or maybe family members that i have more recent photos of)
I think most of the issues with that vista laptop were down to whatever my brother had on the laptop (the OS was NOT wiped before he gave it to me) and the hard drive failing
Another thing, i have no idea what the specs of that laptop were, and the laptop is long gone (I haven’t seen that laptop since 2012, and the windows 7 laptop that was given for my 12th birthday went walkabouts in 2018, along with a faulty windows 10 laptop that kept crashing what felt like every 30 seconds)
I used Vista few times only, and every time it was quite a good experience. Once I upgraded my XP x64 to Vista and the only problem I ran into was the Wifi driver after upgrade was broken; so, I uninstalled and installed a fresh latest version. The computer was a core i3 1st gen laptop with 4G RAM. After some time I upgraded Vista to 7.
Some time later, I found an abandoned dual core with DDR2 computer and found its recovery discs. It came with Freedos from factory and had also a Vista recovery DVD that installed Vista with all drivers and bloatware. When found, the computer ran Windows 7 quite slow (only 2G RAM). After cleaning it and upgrading to full 4G RAM, I restored Vista OS and that computer was quite fast, stable and did not have any issues. Not sure if that OS was x32 or x64 but I think it was 32 bit.
Anyway, my experience with Vista was quite good, of course upgrading the hardware to reasonable level and updating the OS with its SP. Using the right drivers, I never had BSOD and if Windows 7 was not as good as it is, I would use Vista.
I used to read the blog of one of the (head?) engineers of the sound subsystem of Windows Vista. There was a lot of work on taking sound out of the kernel (many crashes were caused by poor drivers), adding separate volume controls for each app, lots of things we take for granted now. It was pretty rough at first, with sound cutting out and resource hogging services. It also broke game that had hardware accelerated mixing.
Yeah they produced a lot of videos at the time I’m the architecture.
They moved a lot of things out of the kernel for stability such as graphics drivers, and reworked the sound and networking.
They also replaced MFCs with a new Ui framework WPF for rich UIs, although I’m. It sure if there was a large take up of this.
One of the biggest problems with Vista is that MS vastly underrated the amount of resources it needed to run smoothly. I was one of the suckers that bought a new Vista machine with 2 GB of RAM, which was thought to be plenty at the time. Running on only 2 GB, it was quite unstable---crashes and white screens were very common. Had I upgraded to 4 GB I'm sure I would've been fine, but instead I upgraded to a Win7 machine shortly after.
People just hate change. As someone who worked in an office who "had" to stay on top of the bleeding edge, we ran betas and pre-release candidates of everything from win98 up. ME was objectively bad... Vista was fine, 8 was fine, 11 is fine. You just have to know how to customize each to your taste and you can have a great experience. There will always be growing pains.
Remember back then that PCs were more expensive (inflation wise $850 in 2007 was like $1370 today) and Netbooks with 1 gigs of ram and single core ATOMs were all the rage with the Asus EEE. We forget this and no that is not being afraid of change but truth that pcs running spinning hard drives of rust were slooooow as it was in the 2000s and Vista excelled at this torture. Especially pcs with low memory footprints which had to constantly swap the slow disk running 3 other things.
I had Vista on a Dell Inspiron laptop back then, had a core 2 duo. I remember it only came with 4GB of ram and it could be a bit sluggish at times, so I got another stick which helped a bit. Honestly most of it I think had to do with Hard Drives of the time. SSD would run blazing fast. I do remember using it on other peoples computer's and it being almost unusable, but it was because they were on the old service pack or something. I know I fixed it. The transition from Vista to 7 for me wasn't a huge difference. The Vista laptop crapped on the old pentium XP desktop I had. Also, a lot of people back then did have under performing hardware. Laptops especially. It wasn't really until after the core 2 era that we started getting adequate hardware for their operating systems. A lot of PC's back then didn't even have 4GB of ram.
I was a bit too young to have grown up with Windows XP, so instead most of my childhood was spent with Windows Vista. I have nothing but positive things to say about the OS! Likewise, I spent my early teens with a laptop that ran Windows 8.1, so I have positive experiences with that OS as well.
As a x64bit O/S I found Vista a god send for my large scale digital paintings, finally I cound use more than 3.5GB RAM in the new ( at the time ) x64 bit Photoshop CS4. I never had a problem with it as the I build my own computers and alway make sure they are slightly ahead of the hardware curve. As you said the problem was marketing and manufactuers using Vista on specs that were way too low. A lot of consumers don't care about specs they just want a computer to work. IMO I think Vista was released too early, and yes Win7 was SP3, which worked very well as computers had caught up by then.
Running Photoshop x64 on a system vastly superior to macos....in 2007....that's a win
dude I hate how boring windows 10 looks
I miss Vista
I really wish Windows gave us the option to theme Windows like old versions, especially Vista's aero glass look.
I went from 95 to 98 to ME to Vista to 8 to 8.1 and now to 10. I never even used 7.. Vista was perfectly fine.
Your channel's contents never stop impressing me, it really deserves more subs.
The two only things bad I remembered after upgrading from XP to Vista were:
1. PIO speed while copying files. Was fixed with SP1.
2. Some games (f.e. C&C Tiberium Wars) crashed on start. Only a fresh installation of the system fixed that. I HATE to do that and I wasn't able to play the game for ±1.5 years. It ran perfectly on XP before.
In the end, it wasn't that bad imho - just too sophisticated for most of the hardware at the time. Jump from XP's requirements for a PC to Vists's was too big for that time.
I have Vista on my first PC, which was a Gateway laptop. It ran fine for me with just the issue of not being able to connect to an old printer, but that was just because there were no driver updates for it. Which wasn't really much of a problem because I almost never needed to print anything. So just using the laptop as a stand alone device to get on the internet with and store some files, it was perfect.
I remember at the time switching directly from Windows XP to ...Mac OS. Only one version, no drivers hell, free updates, native Unix, better support for Asian fonts (I live in Japan), you name it.
Getting back to Windows only now, mainly because of Apple's lack of Nvidia support.
I seem to recall that no drivers was working after my update, and that my ageing laptop became extremely sluggish. As many others I blamed Vista, bought a Mac and didn't look back at MS before Win10.
My dad had Vista on his old laptop, and he never had any technical issues.
Vista was a beautiful and underrated system, just like Windows Millemium. Aero Glass, live wallpapers. Those innovations shaped the future versions of Windows. Similar eyecandy features of GUI were already included in Mac OS X years ago. Vista release was the point when Microsoft caught up with Apple in those terms I think. It was the beginning of 100% user friendly Microsoft OS.
Vista GUI was supposed to be more stylish, vide Windows Longhorn but unfortunately a lot of features were cut. I remember that crazy hype when a lot of magazines were covering the beta versions of Longhorn.
Good times, simpler times, happier times. Great video Dan, brought up a lot of nostalgia 🥁
The User Account Control on Windows 7 ( I know it's later than Vista but still ) actually saved me the trouble of locating and uninstalling bloat ware where it tried to install without me knowing and User Account Control asked me for permission to install and I was relieved, I said no and it was gone. Never heard about it again. I didn't even know what it was that wanted to install which was creepy. :)
the first laptop I ever owned ran windows Vista and I never had any issues with it. I ran Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 on there as well as a couple of music production programs. That Aero theme was real cool to look at for sure but there was a load of custom themes on DeviantArt that I loved to mess around with. I wish that sort of thing were possible on Windows 10 and 11.
Vista came pre installed on a Dell laptop I had and I never had a single issue with it. It certainty was a period though where you really had to go with the OS for "your system", rather than install on an old machine.
Vista was excellent. But came out early, hardware was not capable yet.
When i was a kid (about 7 or 9) i used 7 a lot. It was my mom's PC and all of us loved it because it didn't have any issues when we tried to do out schoolwork on it. Except the "other one", the Vista. That thing became the footstool of the household, earning the title "dinosaur computer" with just how awful it was to use. Most times i was forced to use it because the 7 would've been already taken by my brother. The experience was bad. Like, REALLY bad. Hell, the damn thing froze up so many times that one day when it occurred as usual, when my brother took out the battery to unfreeze it, it stuck on the manufacturers BIOS password. It's still stuck to this day. I hated Vista for years simply for that.
But since I'm older now, looking back on it, it was so visually appealing and smooth with the capable hardware. Way more innovative than Windows 11 (11 looks so ugly to me). And i realized why it ran so bad; the PC's specs was 512mb ram, 32 bit. Literal potato! I dont think ill bother getting it up and running again with the security issues it has now, I'll just use a virtual machine for that. Amazing video by the way! People should know that Vista was a near masterpiece.
The visual theme was what I loved about Vista, as well as the dreamscene desktop feature.
Unfortunately, it was released in a pretty poor state, which ruined its reputation, I remember it being really cumbersome and slow at first.
Before watching the video, I'm gonna just say... Vista wasn't bad, it simply released too early and was too big of an upgrade from XP. People noticed their computers struggling to run it and thought it was the OS being bad when it was actually their hardware. Their computers ran XP perfectly well, but struggled with Vista due to all the extra stuff on it and things like that. Therefore, I expect it to be great on modern computers, though I'd probably prefer 7 personally.
I had Vista and it was absolutely fine! Especially after a few patches. Prior to that I also owned Windows ME and I never had any complaints about that either. Maybe I'm easily pleased!
Windows ME was absolute rubbish.. IIRC I bought a new machine that was ME certified and it was shockingly unstable... I upgraded to XP on the day it was released and it was a million times better... so much more stable, it "Just worked", even though it new. Dont recall any issue with drivers or anything (may be because it was relatively new hardware anyway).
ME on my old Dell Optiplex GX260 ran well with full USB support. Was trying to get 98SE on it but USB support is very flaky.
Windows ME and Vista are fine as long as you don't plan upgrading your machine.
Very underrated OS. I tried Vista SP2 after 7 and experienced no difference except aesthetics. Vista is just prettier, while a freshly installed Windows 7 greets you with the ugliest default wallpaper imaginable, and with aero turned off, you might as well use the classic theme because it looks better.
Vista was ahead of its time for sure. I still remember being blown away by the gui back in late 2007 when my family bought a brand new dell inspiron desktop with vista on it. It felt so different and futuristic compared to xp and ran beautifully still one of my favorite OS. Vista walked so Windows 7 could run.
I almost never had an opportunity to use Windows Vista on physical computer since my father, as far as I know, never liked upgrades. He bought a Vista laptop (Acer Aspire 5720z) somewhere in 2008 and he downgraded to XP as soon as he turned it on. The laptop had 2 GB RAM and Pentium processor (dual-core, not really sure which one) so I think it won't run Vista really bad (or maybe it would). He used XP until around 2016 and then decided to upgrade to 7 (by an advice of his brother who has been using Windows 7 for a long time), thus skipped Vista, and not long time after that he bought a new Windows 10 laptop, but decided to install 7 anyways. I used Vista only on a VM with pretty much same specs as his Acer laptop and it ran fine, without any big problems (but on a VM, so no wonder it worked that way)
My first experience with Vista was with RC1 that came with a computer's magazine in Summer of 2006. I wondered what was that and it was a early stage of Vista before RTM. I had a new pc short after Summer 2006 but the specs weren't great... pentium 4 531 at 3.0ghz, single 512mb ddr 400, nvidia geforce 6200 256mb vram, 160gb sata hdd from maxtor (this hdd had amnesia for sometime, firmware issue). When I installed RC1, it was beautiful and painfully slow. The computer's magazine made a dvd menthly available with fresh drivers and kept installing vista/xp alternatelly. I got bored of always doing this and kept using xp until I got a copy of pirated vista plus activation.
The RC1 copy came with a cd-key and I was able to activate with that key by phoning MS center and noted the numbers on a paper for a late use, it would work as long as the hardware never changed.
Vista was fine for me but I had no capable hardware and software made for xp didn't run that well.
Found it ok on my q8200 cpu running 4gb, apart from registry issues with USB devices. Will stick with Windows 10 and Linux distros for the foreseeable future. Great video Dan, real blast from the past!
I totally agree Windows 7 is Windows Mojave. I was the biggest Windows 7 fan, during its beta program. Then just before RTM I switched back to Vista for next few years and the main reason was performance. Let's say that contrary to common belief GUI performance of Windows 7 decreased compared to Vista. WDDM 1.1 drivers saved from 50MB to maybe at most 200MB in extreme cases of system memory at the expense of severly impacting drawing performance and keeping some junk in video ram even when I had tons of RAM (Vista didn't cling to content in video RAM like Win7 did because it always had copy in system RAM). Where it came to it: benchmarks favored Vista SP2. I mean game benchmarks and GUI benchmarks. Only benchmarks which rely heavily on disk performance didn't but this was due to two things: 1. background services didn't really wait until user was away and tried to squeeze activity while user him/herself was active leading to latency issues. 2. Vista was configured for file system resiliency. In other words if there was power failure Vista's way it did write operation in file system would lead to less issues. Win7 by default was configured more like XP so potentially less safe but faster, especially when writing a lot of small files. Back to benchmarks I rememeber typical comment of reviewer was "Surprisingly Vista SP2 is marginally faster than Windows 7. In time as programs are written for newest Microsoft operating system this trend will surely change..." and then go back to notion that Windows 7 is the faster OS even if all the benchmarks just proved otherwise. Personally I had to drop Vista as AMD dropped support for this OS. Over the years Microsoft made this OS obsolete with dropping support for it in Visual Studio compilers so today a lot of programs won't work on it. In fact its compatibility isn't any better than XP. Windows 7 can be however used instead for Aero experience.
I had a laptop with XP from 2003 which had 512 MB of RAM and a slow Intel Celeron. In late 2007, I got a PC bundled with Vista and it had 4 GB of RAM and a Core 2 Duo P8600. On this computer, Vista ran like a charm and booted up in like 20 seconds.
I agree though, the aesthetics of Vista (and Windows 7) are streets ahead of Windows 8, 8.1, 10 and 11. I have no idea what Microsoft’s design ethos is anymore. It is neither functional, consistent, artistic etc.
It wasn't the best, it just came out at a wrong time. Most PC hardware wasn't ready for it yet, it was advertised poorly, and it had the misfortune of having to follow up XP. I love Vista to bits, so much so I've modified my W10 machine to look like it as much as possible, and I'll be honest if it were still supported I would definitely use it as my daily driver. Still can't get over how hard the Vista Aero goes
Windows 10 and 11 still have WinSAT so you could still get a Windows Experience Index rating for your system, but you have to run it on an elevated Command Prompt/PowerShell or use Winaero WEI Tool (I recommend the latter). My ROG Strix Scar 1 (Windows 10) got a rating of 7.2 last time.
I never had any issues with Vista. I had the Home Premium edition and it was a great OS. I never understood why there was any hate for it.
The first release was quite bogged down with constant disk access. SP1 fixed that and many other issues.