This article has been in my to read list for a few days now, but due to a lack of time I haven’t been able to finish it yet. There’s a lot of information in the article about the development of Windows Vista, and even though I haven’t finished it yet I can guarantee you it’s worth the read.
Mauro A. Meloni submitted a link to the article, accompanied by the following note:
It is quite long, but I’ve found it really interesting. It is a view of the old Microsoft, with its idiocyncracies and good and bad points, as seen from the inside.
I understand that Vista set the ground for the better Win7, but personally, my experience with the former was worse than awful. Sometimes a simple file copy operation of a few kb could take minutes. The real-time AV scans delayed every icon refresh, and each time I had to scan for Windows Updates, it would take a whole afternoon… Performance-wise, it was deplorable.
My experience with Vista wasn’t all that different, but especially with the powers of hindsight it’s hard to discount just how important Vista has been for Microsoft. It was all part of Microsoft’s massive cleanup effort in the Windows codebase, the fruits of which the company is still picking today, and will be picking for a long, long time to come. Many other a company would’ve been forced to write a completely new operating system, but Microsoft actually managed to clean up such a complex codebase.
The cleanup of the Windows codebase might very well be one of the most impressive technical achievements in Microsoft’s history, and Vista is a hugely important part of that.
So was Vista really that bad if you were using compatible apps/drivers?
Yes.
I think Vista’s biggest kick to the face was the memory management was terrible, or that it just ate all the system memory. On my system that should have otherwise handled it, it took 14 hours to run windows update… at which point it still wasn’t finished, so I killed it, wiped and went back to XP. It should have been fine at 1GB of ram, but Vista seemed to require at least 2GB without swapping hard.
Yes. It was ABYSMAL on laptops, even my then-worldshaking C2D with 4GB RAM. Constant disk thrash, taking 5+ minutes to shut down gracefully, high CPU usage and thus high temperatures, incompatibility with everything that still expected XP… Vista RTM was so bad that I wiped it and installed Ubuntu 8.04.
Hi,
For “service pack 2”, the problem was fools trying to use it on obsolete hardware (with incompatible drivers and/or not enough RAM). On “modern when Vista was released” hardware it was fine.
Without service pack 2 there were some issues; but this is normal – almost everything (CPUs, OSs, apps, …) is initially released buggy and fixed in later revisions. Smart people wait while “early adopters” discover all the teething problems.
– Brendan
It is “normal” only in modern days since “Agile” crap went mainstream.
The problem is not ‘agile’ practices, but corporate misapplication because ‘muh profit’ and ‘first to market’. If you follow agile practices properly the major version will not be released until it is ready.
Addendum: you will of course release test builds early and often.
Edited 2017-06-07 18:23 UTC
I’m sorry, but what competition does Microsoft have with Windows, in all honesty? Unless ReactOS and WINE have somehow got to 100% compatability, if you want to run Windows apps, you need Microsoft Windows.
I can’t see how they need to rush a release of Windows to be the near non-existent competition.
Of course, you have Macs and Linux, but they’re useless if you rely on Windows applications for your day-to-day activities
Well, the operating system is largely irrelevant today with most stuff done through browsers. And cross platform applications are quite common reducing the number of people dependent on a specific OS. I haven’t had Windows installed since summer 2013 (Windows Server 2008, Vista-based). And I don’t miss it. I rarely used it at that time, and I use Wine for the two Windows applications I still use (Steam and good ol’ ancient Autocad R14).
Yup. I had what was considered a pretty beefy system for the time (Pentium 4 3.6Ghz with HT, 4Gb of RAM, dual 500Gb HDDs, Geforce 7600GS) and frankly with WHQL drivers? It handled about like a 233Mhz running XP.
What I especially loved was how if you were doing ANYTHING with media (music or video) and started doing network file copy/move ops? The network would either die or get slower than dialup, that was sooo nice for those of us who ran LANs.
Or how about the “senior moments” where Vista would just randomly freeze for a few seconds? Didn’t matter what you were doing, browsing, listening to music, hell it would have senior moments just browsing its own files…nice.
After 6 months of dealing with that bullshit? I went back to XP X64 and…ahhh, it was like a breath of fresh air. I stayed on XP X64 until Win 7 X64 came out and while I spent a few months each on Win 8, 8.1 and 10 and each of those three were nasty enough with the UI (or the spyware in the case of win 10) I ended up going back to 7 I have to give MSFT credit in that at least those OSes were functional which is more than I can say for Vista RTM.
It may have gotten better later but it had left too sour a taste in my mouth to go back. The only positive I could say about Vista? I liked the black accents, I ended up keeping that in win 7, the rest was shite though.
Not for me – I used Vista/64 for many years, at work, no games or such. Granted that you needed good and stable hardware, lot of RAM, fast HD drives; it was crucial to disable most background processes with disk activity (search indexing, various prefetches, antivirus, win update etc) – but then it just flied.
Every major update/SP (I applied these maybe once a year, to avoid logoffs and reboots – do not do that at home!) made things a bit worse however. Anyway, I do not miss Vista, but don’t have bad memories of it neither.
Yet here I am on a Win 10 system and I yearn for XP.
Nostalgia is deceptive and you usually only remember the good things.
Windows XP was an absolute mess until SP2, that thing didn’t even have an active firewall out of the box, you had to turn it on manually until SP2 arrived, and was a buffer overflow bug ridden fuckfest.
Good things like a user interface that just gets on with it.
Yearnings aren’t logical.
Most people would sooner buy a car that’s got real safety features, burglar alarms and so on — even if it looks stupid and handles like a milk float — than an old Mini that might kill your kids but is far more fun. But which would they yearn for?
You try persuading yourself to genuinely enjoy and be grateful for a goopy mess of a user interface — half transitioned to who-knows-what desktop metaphor, with gratuitous animations between every state transition — because the system is more secure, less buggy, comes with its very own firewall, custom spyware, and has finally changed out of short trousers.
We are not obliged to like this uninspiring rubbish just because its both less rubbish and less inspiring than before.
Understood, but misplaced. XP, or even windows 98 before it, could use much less resources to do the same things. Pretty insane, when you think about it.
Moar GHZ, GB et all, but basically doing the same things we always did. We’re just doing it more securely, and probably more prettily and possibility more user friendly-r. Honestly, if they went back to the Windows 1.0 UI and applications supported it and also scaled back to that. I wouldn’t mind.
Actually, quite a large part of those resources go not into doing things “more securely, more prettily and more friendly”, but into allowing developers be more and more lazy and dumber with each generation. Heavily relying on frameworks, 3rd party libraries and layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction until you can “develop” an application almost entirely in WYSIWYG-like editor…
Yeah, disagree strongly.
That’s very, very, very true on the web. But not so much inside of windows development, either then or now, with the exception of the mentioned WinFS and Avalon.
From the article:
This. A thousand times this.
When I was installing my brand-new copy of Vista, back in April 2007, I was feeling confident: Intel CoreDuo T2500 at 2GHz, 1GB of RAM with expandability to 2GB, ATI Radeon X1600 with all-dedicated VRAM. Top of the line mid-2006 stuff. There was no way my laptop couldn’t run Vista well.
Then I used the damn OS… and kept thinking: Why is this thing so much slower than its​ predecessor the laptop used to run? Wasn’t the new kermel supposed to be better? Where are the improvements to justify the place all those extra CPU cycles and RAM and battery mAhs go? Why is the new Windows Update so slow?
I now know the cause of this: A lack of an Agile process, resulting in a mass of buggy and poorly optimized code that was hammered around to almost usable state just before release date. For example, I read somewhere that Windows Update calls the performance index millions of times, while MS themselves recommend only one, due to a poorly optimized recursive function.
Vista wasn’t a good thing the results of which Microsoft is still reaping the rewards today. It is the reason why Microsoft still won’t put Windows Proper on anything less than a Surface Pro beast (by mobile standards). It is the reason Windows RT took 16GB of space on the Surface RT, a 32GB machine, and was slower than the iPad and with less battery life. It is the reason why today’s newest Qualcomm chips still can’t run Continuum and we still have to wait for future hardware. It is the reason mainstream laptops for Windows 7 were still beasts with whirling fans in a Macbook Air world. The bloat that Vista gave to Windows is the thing that killed Microsoft’s anti-iPad strategy (and any anti-Macbook Air strategy during the Windows 7 era) more than anything else and still does today.
Edited 2017-06-07 00:39 UTC
iPads in the Windows 7 era were pure consumption devices that ran apps from a store that was shared with iPhone apps that had started to develop a developer base. They were always-on single tasking devices. Microsoft had no comparable hardware, software, development platform and by the time they introduced one they were too far behind in mindshare.
Anti-MacBook Air strategy???? It wasn’t that Windows machines couldn’t run in that formfactor, just that the hardware makers were all focused on the race to the bottom. Intel soon created the ultrabook category, Microsoft introduced the Surface line and hardware makers realised they could charge more for machines that people liked to use. None of this had anything to do with software-bloat
Ahh, the ultrabook. Even after massive help from Moore’s law, ultrabooks and the other slim Windows laptops still struggled with Windows.
I don’t think I understand your reasoning very well. You seem to compare everything to the MacBook Air which has always had very high specs for a very high price. Similar priced/specced Windows machines didn’t have any issue running Windows, but of course 200 dollar netbooks with Atom CPU’s didn’t compare well to the 1500 dollar MacBook Air.
You also keep saying that mobile devices cannot run Windows Proper, but iPads also cannot run OSX Proper. Mobile devices get a mobile OS for various reasons. Microsoft is actually much closer to “1 OS for everything” compared to Apple. And to run iOS or OSX well you need a pretty “beasty” machine (a “classic” MacBook struggled to run OSX just as much as a netbook struggled with Windows 7)
Please compare device like-for-like and you will see that OSX and Windows Proper require about the same hardware to run well. The same for iOS and Windows Mobile.
Actually it was quite well explained if you paid attention to the releases – Vista was not optimized. They hadn’t gotten that far in the development cycle, so there was a lot of extra crap in there that exploded the binary sizes and memory usages.
And yes, you have to be extremely careful with compiling with optimizations. Often with Visual Studios there’s a whole new set of issues when you go from non-optimized code to optimized code, from Debug builds to Release builds.
Also remember, when Vista was released it had been 6 years since their last major release of the OS, and they were already having lots of issues with their Volume licensing customers – their core customers. After XP they had changed their Volume Licensing program to do 3 year contracts, promising upgrades during that time. Only they messed up big time. They were under the gun to do a release after 5 years, and pushed Vista out the door.
FYI – recalling from the time – when they moved to that new Volume Licensing program around 66% made the change; after failing to deliver only 66% renewed. So yeah big money was at stake.
Now, 90+% of the issues were due to Microsoft making some major changes in the drivers between the last Vista Release Candidate (RC2) and the Release To Manufacturers (RTM) that broke everyone’s drivers.
So yeah – Vista had problems due to:
– pushes by management to do a release b/c of
– threats by big customers to not renew contracts
– dev processes not being able to run their full course
– code not being fully optimized and debugged
That said, it worked wonderfully on most computers – even the original RTM – when all updates, etc were applied and people paid attention to drivers. You couldn’t necessarily rely on the drivers from Microsoft, you had to go to device manufacturers. For most this wouldn’t be an issue since they bought it new, but they had to enable driver updates from the manufacturer – f.e use HP’s or Dell’s driver updater.
Sadly, most turned those off, and most ignored running things in compatibility modes.
Does that sentence just sound odd to anyone else? In English, one doesn’t “pick” the fruits of one’s labour; one enjoys them.
If they could wipe out the NSA and CIA stuff, that also will help about performance, network bandwidth and power consumption.
It is a Dutch expression: “de vruchten plukken” -> Picking the fruits. It is basically equivalent to “reaping what you sow”.
(and you have to pick fruits before you can enjoy them, right?)
I think Thom made a little mistake there. 🙂
Maybe BeamishBoy just buy fruits by the bag 😉 I do that with oranges. [Note: oranges used to be expensive at Netherlands decades ago, has the Union changed that?]
That bit is true, yes! 🙂
Microsoft guaranteed improved performance, I swear hearing that prior to each and every new version of Windows. That wasn’t ever my experience in actual use.
With a SSD I could get XP to boot within 15 secs. FPS in games was better than Vista or Win7. Vista was at all times slower than XP.
Vista + Explorer took ages to find anything, always re-indexing. Searches/copying/deleting took ages to initiate – they STILL DO! XP would finish copying before an NT6 system had even evaluated what to do.
Occasionally it would require a reboot just because it would grind to a halt. BSODs? they were common on Vista.
UAC – an aborted attempt at user security. Still pointless at the user level.
With an SSD, I used to boot Windows 7 in 6-7 seconds. And my PC wasn’t really top of the line for the time. Granted, it wasn’t low-end, either. What I mean, 15 seconds boot time is _not_ very good if you have SSD.
And my machine probably would have booted Win 7 in 30-45 secs, one of my current laptops, a comparable machine to my old XP system, 2.5ghz core2duo boots in 35 secs from an SSD.
Windows NT6 has improvements in all directions but the process getting there has been strewn with disasters and the train wreck continues.
I would like a desktop o/s not a frankenOS. I’d like to be able to run the interface of my choice, the one I know, I’d like the UIX to be fully customisable, I’d like changes to the UIX to be optional. I’d like copying, folder finding and search operations not to take longer than they should – discovering… all the time.
If that was given to me I would be the staunchest of supporters. The real reason why people still hark back to XP is this delivery of regular crocks of sh1t that MS force you to swallow.
Nothing gets my goat more than being told how to use a computer. As a previous poster stated I want the o/s to get out of MY way, I don’t want it to tell me that I need to operate it as if it is a tablet or phone. I don’t want it to react to my needs. I want it to do WHAT IT IS TOLD.
Edited 2017-06-07 08:12 UTC
My Windows 2000 on Via C7 @ 2 GHz with an old 500 GB HD from Samsung boots in less than 20 seconds. The bloat is an important factor.
“It was all part of Microsoft’s massive cleanup effort in the Windows codebase,”
Nowhere in the article is the term “cleanup” used. Instead, there is much discussion of replacing legacy code with “managed code”. In the end, the latter was dumped.
If Vista truly lead to something new and better, the article doesn’t provide a clue as to how it happened. Anyone?
Moving drivers from kernel level to userspace, thereby avoiding the BSOD because of crap drivers.
In my University class on Computer Operating Systems (1974/75) we used to talk a lot about how the OS was there to facilitate the objective of the system and how it should just get out of the way as much as possible.
A few years later, I could configure an RT-11 (Dec PDP-11 OS) to run in around 3KB. It got out of the way pretty much all the time.
Microsoft seem to have never learned this and with every release it gets worse. More bloated, more in your face and more ‘nannying, MS knows best’.
Thankfully, I now no longer have to suffer the daily grind of fighting MS and their idiocy. As Thom said, Vista took this to new levels. W7 gave us something back but W10 is several leaps too far into the ‘We will control how you use your computer’ that MS seems to want these days.
Not every computer is a phone you know but MS seems to be incapable of learning that.
And that supported generic keyboard-input, basic memory, basic display and CPU and not much else. Getting a mouse to work was to difficult for most users, multitasking was generally impossible, every program that wanted to use sound or a printer had to implement their own software/drivers, etc.
Nowadays we install an OS with voice control working during the installation process in high-res and after install we get automatic drivers for everything working immediately through an internet connected update server.
From a technical point of view the old situation might seem better, but there is a reason there are now billions of users instead of the handful of technical specialists in the past
My class on Operating Systems was 1971, and it was a bit of surprise to learn that one of the OS’s we were studying (Multics – big brother of Unix) used something like 60% of available memory, and the OS developers considered that this was OK. (It’s better code than any user will write, so of course we deserve all that memory.)
I thought Vista moved GPU drivers into the kernel and Windows 7 moved it out again.
I also thought a lot of code which was written for Vista was dumped later because it didn’t work.
Vista was the result of a major rewrite of the Windows codebase.
After XP, Microsoft set off on the next version of Windows which included a SQL Server-based File system called WinFS among many other features. However, after 3 years of development they found they couldn’t release it – the performance was abysmal and unusable.
Then they bought Groovy and Ray Ozzie came in and took over the development teams. They scrapped everything since XP and started a refactor among which:
– they decreased the dependency depth from 1500 to some thing far lower (I forget what)
– they made it possible to build software without having to include “Windows.h” for everything (doable under XP, but hard)
– they removed kernel dependencies on userland
– they removed circular dependencies
– they created and succeeded in the MinWin project which ultimately produced a Linux-like experience and a 40MB disk footprint.
– Internet Explorer was pulled out of the Windows dependencies aside from the help system (where it was too ingrained) – making it possible to later do the Edge Browser.
MinWin never got publicly released; but it did enable them to do Windows Server Core, which was released.
Ultimately, Win7 was what WinVista should have been – but that’s b/c it was further in the development process; things were optimized, fixed, etc.
And that’s ignoring the whole issue about the change that drove everyone nuts with users no longer being admin – but that’s primarily software developer’s fault for not paying attention to what Microsoft had been saying since Win2000 about needing to minimize usage of admin apis; though admittedly the changes above enabled them to minimize which APIs were truly admin APIs.
Surely the change from 9x to XP was an “opportunity to clean up the codebaseâ€. The fact that it took the best part of decade to update XP can hardly be seen as a triumph of impressive technical achievement. Vista was a more modern OS than XP – well in the time it took to release it bloody well should have been. The fact remains that it took ages to release, much of the promised innovation never shipped, it was slow and vile to use.
Windows 7 only looked good because Vista was horrid and Windows 8 worse.
You need to study up a bit on your history. XP was a MERGER of codebases from the 9x kernel (mostly userland actually) to the NT kernel. 95->98->98SE->ME and NT 3.51->NT4->NT5 (2000)->NT5.1 (XP)
After XP SP2 (which could have been called a new OS but was a free major upgrade that finally made XP good) there was finally 1 codebase for both consumer, enterprise and server at Microsoft. There wasn’t really any competition left so Microsoft did what they do worst: Think grandiose and act on it!
Vista was supposed to be so much more (google BlackComb/Longhorn demos) but they couldn’t get it to work/perform so eventually they returned to the Server 2003 x64 codebase, implemented everything they thought was needed for Vista (UAC, new driver model) in a “minimum viable product” way and put it on the market before it was ready. It took hardware makers a while to get Vista-drivers ready, it took software makers a while to adjust to running as non-admin, it took Microsoft a while to fix some of the major bugs (like the file-copying-issue) and by the time SP1 came out Vista had become a decent OS with hugely increased requirements but a good foundation for the future. Ever since they have kept refining Vista with 7->8->8.1->10 all getting more features and performance without increasing requirements
Yes and your point is?
MS did some serious innovation when moving from 9x to XP. XP was a very different (and very much better) OS to 9x (built on the NT rather than 9x kernel) yet could run the same programs. MS took more or less a decade to update XP to Vista – it was a more modern (in 10 years it should be), but vile OS, I cant see this as “one of the most impressive technical achievements.†And as you state when it did ship much of the innovation of Longhorn was stripped away.
Certainly I see Haiku rebuilding and modernizing the BeOS codebase as way more impressive.
Edited 2017-06-07 07:41 UTC
Sorry, what did the NT-codebase do that other operating systems hadn’t done before ?
Allow the same programs and games that ran on non-secure and crashy 9x to run on secure and stable NT, basically allowing all home users a seemless upgrade from a childstoy-OS to a grownup-OS. (aka compatibility)
That’s not innovation.
That’s compatibility and installed base.
Just like making a working space shuttle out of Lego that allows children to fly themselves to Mars is compatibility and installed base
(I was not the one talking about innovation, but I was responding to the question what XP did that other Operating Systems didn’t)
Sounds like a great idea about Lego and Mars. Seems like a product that would sell. 😉
Ohh, OK, sorry for the confusion.
(source: https://www.haiku-os.org/about/faq#what-is-haiku)
Windows 7 was good in his own right, a polished and stable OS based on Vista. I’m working in the IT industry since the Windows 3.11 era, and that was the first time I installed a new OS after 3 months of release. Prior to that I didn’t even bother with anything new until it had 1 year market experience.
This is mindless MS hate.
Win 7 is still the best desktop OS Microsoft ever made.
I see no use for an upgrade to 8 or 10.
Actually, no. Windows 2000 was the best desktop OS Microsoft ever made.
Windows 2000 was brilliant – fast, stable and very lightweight.
Windows 2000 was insecure. So was XP when it came out.
I’ve never upgraded from Windows 2000 to Windows XP because Windows 2000 was better. So I know what you mean.
The problem is Windows 2000 is obsolete now. No security updates, bad support for current hardware, modern software has problems installing.
But I probably agree with you. Windows 2000 was beter.
Edited 2017-06-07 10:22 UTC
IMHO MS should have evolved W2k instead of following the XP route. Imagine a fully updated W2k with some modern icons, drivers and software!
That was Windows XP. Turn off Luna, and it was mostly Win2k under the surface.
Well, actually XP is 2000 improved, with multi-core support (which 2000 lacked) and better security (starting SP2). You can switch XP theming to ‘Classic’ to even feel back to 2000.
Windows 2000 was sure very brilliant, mine still runs from time to time. Boot fast, takes 200 MB in memory, snappy and useful like day one.
I ran Win2k and Win2k server. I even used a dual 933MHz P3 with 2GB RAM and SCSI RAID running Server as a desktop for a while (before switching to Linux).
IMO W2K was faster, lighter and far more stable than XP. Server also supported dual processors and up to 4GB of RAM.
7 is a good OS, but there isn’t anything that I can think of that it does better than 10. There are a whole lot of improvements in 10 though, here are some of my favorites:
* Windows Update on 7 is pretty much broken and takes almost a day from “RTM” to “Current” with a lot of reboots in between and literally hundreds of patches installing. Updating 10 (even from 1507-RTM to 1703-Current) is done in under an hour, requires 2 reboots and adds 3 patches.
* Much better hardware support through generic drivers and added drivers through Windows Update. Most computers don’t require any driver-hunting anymore after a few minutes of updating. There is also better support for SSD’s (defrag/optimize) and VideoCards (DX12)
* Commandline in 10 finally has normal copy/paste and resizable window and hundreds of improvements (just do dism /online /? or pnputil /? on both)
* HyperV
* Synching through Microsoft account
* (OPTIONAL!!!) apps from a store
* Better multi-monitor, split-view and virtual desktop
* Much more useful Task Manager
* Faster startup, better powermanagement, connected standby
* WindowsKey + X for a powerusermenu!
* Built-In ISO-mounting
* A lot more, but I hope you saw something that is interesting for you
You know what Windows 7 does what Windows 10 cannot?
* Gives you control over your computer (and updates)
* Does not force useless crap such as Cortana, Windows Store apps etc. down your throat
* Regards you as a little bit less of an infantile moron (talking about Win10 progress and error messages such as “We’re doing some stuff here”, “Whoopsy daisy something happened :-(((” and “We’re so happy to see you here”).
* Actually, Windows 10 (although unfortunately not Home, but you sound like a Pro guy anyway) now gives you more control over updates compared to Windows 7 with “Active Hours”, “Restart Options”, “Pause Updates”. There is also a whole section called “Privacy” in Settings where you have total control. But if you believe all the “telemetry/spying issues” I don’t feel like there is much use in discussing this any further.
* Store apps aren’t useless crap, but if you don’t like it you can remove it with 1 single command (https://4sysops.com/archives/remove-provisioned-built-in-apps-in-win…)
* And if an OS bothers you because it shows a “we’re so happy to see you here” instead of “Welcome” or “Logon successful”, well, then again I don’t feel like there is much use in discussing this any further.
Enjoy Windows 7, while it lasts (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fac…)
Actually, I am enjoying macOS and Windows 10 LTSB (which is completely different from all other Win10 versions in most aspects I described).
I agree Windows 10 LTSB is almost as usable as Windows 7 after some heavy customization and tuning, but regular Windows 10 Home/Pro is just unbearable. Even Windows 8 was much less disturbing (after installing Classic Shell).
Actually, I would very happily still use Windows XP if some critical stuff like SHA2 certificates, high-DPI screens etc. were supported there.
Basically, the last version of Windows that was totally fine and usable out of the box was Windows 2000. Later versions all require at least half an hour of customization to make user experience pleasant.
Good choice to use the LTSB, but after 1703 I personally see no reason for that compared to Pro.
“30 minutes of customization” has ALWAYS been necessary for every Windows version to make it work the way I want it to work. The same is true for any other OS on phones/tablets/routers/servers. Windows has always allowed me to configure it in a way that I like, every new version of Windows has always caused me some pain and some more gain.
Enjoy OSX, and Windows 10, both with “lifetime” free upgrades
Actually, OSX is not technically lifetime… Old hardware gets dropped from new OS versions on a regular basis. But I doubt I will be using same Mac after 5-10 years from now, so it does not really matter.
As for Windows 10 LTSB — hard to tell how long my MSDN subscription will live, so also technically not a lifetime… 🙂
How about:
1) giving users more control in terms of update management
2) less invasive, privacy-wise
Edited 2017-06-08 10:01 UTC
Vista SP1 and up was not that bad. With some tweaking it was a fine business OS.
Everybody loves Windows 7, but they forget that hardware was also faster when at that time.
Some things were better in Vista imho, for example, the word “My” had disapeared. “Documents” instead of “My Documents”.
Edited 2017-06-07 07:20 UTC
Upgrading Vista machines to 7 often solved performance issues on that machine. The machine didn’t get faster in that case – it was still the same machine. The only difference was the OS.
At the time, both XP and 7 were upgrades to Vista when it came to performance on any given hardware.
MS failed to have the nerves to roll out the truly great features including WinFS. Instead they doubled down on backdoors for the powers that be and DRM. The consumer side saw applications break due to draconian rights management. Those with the proper tools could bypass it in seconds. Meanwhile everyone still bent over for activation because end users didn’t experience its pains until re-install time. Not including Vista users in the free upgrade to 10 was the latest judgement failure.
Edited 2017-06-07 12:07 UTC
What backdoors? You know people externally to MS have seen the source code, right? You know there have been extensive reverse-engineering of Windows searching for ways to circumvent the security, right?
I do suspect that Microsoft’s official minimum system requirements for Vista were too low and this encouraged a lot of XP users with frankly poor hardware to upgrade to Vista and then complain about its poor performance.
I got a fairly decent new Vostro 400 (4GB RAM, Q6600 quad core) with Vista installed and it was perfectly fine, even if the far-too-frequent UAC prompting did drive me somewhat to distraction (I think later Vista service packs reduced the UAC prompting somewhat).
One slightly bemusing thing was that if you tried to install Vista from an early generic retail DVD, the install disk didn’t actually contain the network driver needed for my Vostro 400! Chicken and egg situation (the drivers were downloadable, but I have no net connection!). A good job I dual booted with Linux (where the network worked out of the box, unlike Vista) and could save the Windows network driver on a USB stick…
I’m not sure what world are you coming from, but for me OS install CD/DVD having a working network driver for my hardware was a surprise, and not an expectation. I have installed countless computers in the old days, but I have never expected to have a working network card right out of the box. That is why I would always prepare CD/USB with appropriate driver in advance, or have another internet-connected machine (plus a spare USB key) near me.
I am not sure what is the hate on XP without any SP.
I run that for years, the first time I updated to SP1 was because Chronicle of Riddick required it. It was without issue.
I had no internet access at the time though, but the system was rocksolid and performant on a 1200MHz Duron.
I used SP1 with internet during university years on a more powerful hardware, and with the right drivers, there was no issue again.
I don’t think I ever used SP2.
Yeah, I also used XP in all it’s stages, from RTM through SP1/2/3. For me as a user, there were no problems whatsoever with XP without any Service Packs. Granted, SP3 made XP truly awesome, even up to this day, but SP-less XP was also fine.
What was disappointing to the “managed” fandom and good for the “old new thing” guys (Win32 API fandom), is that this Longhorn experiment demonstrated that native code still matters and its performance, scalability and proven history are still unbeatable.
Windows NT kernel is a nice piece of technology.
This is an amazing book that tales the Windows NT history:
https://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-Generation-Micr…
NT was the closest to What the classical definition OS is. Masses class. The most well deserved success.
After that, MS had to handle a market, and a legacy. Till this day. All the products having to conform to this -every day longer- train.
[And this is the right path, because a market is made of -habits.]
On the sharing of responsibilities, MS is doing his part. Stronger efforts on community and consumer code to bring their stacks to the new tools necessary.
Windows NT, IMHO, is probably the most portable, well designed and expandable OS designed since UNIX. With support for multiple application subsystems (Win32, OS/2 and Linux) and support for many different processor architectures, i can’t think of many non-unix systems that are as flexible, compatible and stable as Windows NT.
UNIX — I can agree on flexible and stable, but well designed??? Really? You consider Unix “well designed”??? In what Universe is that a good design? 🙂 Or maybe you are talking about some kind of little-known special Unix that I am not aware of? In that case, please share.
Main effort went to sand-boxing the beasts. These are still there.
If you want safe code, refresh your code contracts to the new tools.
Sand-boxing is to protect MS, not you.
Edited 2017-06-07 13:41 UTC
If rewriting it would have been faster, and could have been plenty compatible enough (OSX vs macOS) – then what did they really gain? They could have gone faster, and gotten a better product by redeveloping….
“Redevelop” is almost never a good idea.
The Win32 API is a huge piece of technology that actually works, with a lot of bug fixes and rare scenarios.
Rewriting Win32 API from scratch in another platform (.NET) was an invitation to the disaster… and so it was.
After years of trying to do it, Jim Alchin decided to throw all this “innovative stuff that did not work” and continue using what was proven and working: The Win32 API path.
So, at the end, after the failure trying to create a new “.NET OS”, Vista is an actual continuation of XP.
Almost right, except that UWP is the return of Longhorn ideas, this time built on top of COM, C++/CX and .NET Native.
And this time they aren´t going back, rather going full speed with the introduction of the desktop bridge as well.
macOS was just a rebrand of OS X. They’re fundamentally the same platform.