Ask some people why Windows Vista failed and they will tell you that most of the problem came from hardware compatibility. I don’t remember ever having problems with Vista back when I used it. Then again I was running it on a brand new computer with the OS in question preinstalled.
And that’s another thing, I think you’re pretty much expected to upgrade your hardware at least every few years. I’d like to think that the people who had problems with Vista kept the same white-box PC they’ve had since 98SE, or even 95. Vista ran great if you had the right hardware. Maybe if Microsoft had optimized their OS even for XP-era machines it would have seen greater adoption.
I also really liked the Aero glass theme, it made younger me feel like I was in the future. Those gadgets at the side of the desktop were pretty cool too. Overall I think it was definitely ahead of its time, and with support for current software and hardware, would have been a solid choice for average computer users today.
Yeah, I’m no MS fanboy at all, but Vista really wasn’t that bad.
Most of the complaints were because of crappy hardware manufacturers putting out systems that were only meeting the minimum specs to run Vista. Those “Walmart special” PCs usually had 512 MB RAM and a low-quality Seagate drive. That, and hardware vendors with crappy driver support.
Once it booted to the desktop, your 512 MB was gone. As soon as you try to launch an application, it would start swapping nonstop to disk and everything just crawled. That put a lot of wear and tear on the disk which eventually failed because it was low quality to start with.
I worked in a repair shop back in Vista’s heyday, and the fix was always the same: Give it at least a GB of memory, replace the failing Seagate drive, reinstall, and it ran like it should have when it was new.
This one. Most systems in the spec didn’t have the RAM to run aero effectively, and ran like shit. If you had 1-2GB of RAM, it worked fine; just you had less of that RAM available to allocate to the same apps that worked great under XP. If you were lucky enough to have a 64-bit processor, Vista was actually pretty nice, compared to the XP 64-bit edition and the driver nightmare that entailed.
All that. I ran the Saturn pre-release and it was a damned nightmare for resource hogging.