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I've heard a LOT on how bad the launch was with Windows Vista and all of that so I'm curious to hear if any of y'all were around at that time and how Windows Vista was when it came out. I personally never experienced it since I was very young when Vista came out. I've seen more Windows XP computers in my town currently than Vista xD. Again though my curiosity really want's to know peoples experiences with the launch of Windows Vista.

I remember a lot of hate for it to the point that it became a running joke. The British show "The IT Crowd" even makes a joke about Vista being bad. Even to this day I meet people who say Vista was trash but had never actually used it before. I never thought it was that bad and didn't have a bad experience. However, I will readily admit that Service Pack 1 really did improve performance significantly.

There were multiple factors that went against it, I think. The first was that everyone loved XP. 98 was good, but XP was kind of a big leap. People were kind of angry about XP at first because it was more resource-hungry than 98, but having NTFS on a client OS (as opposed to only on Windows Server) and other improvements were positives. It seems like folks were finally settling into the groove of XP when Vista came along 5 years later.

The next problem is it had the same problem as XP: it required a significant resource jump, so some people would need to upgrade their hardware again to run Vista well. If you're not building from scratch, that could potentially mean having to buy a completely new computer to support Vista. I can't remember, but I think it was also around the time Intel's Core 2 architecture became popular, which meant your upgrade could be pricey due to the new hardware, which leads into the next problem. I don't quite remember, but Intel had been abusing a near-monopoly for a long time (FTC Statement), so IIRC, it was hard to get a pre-built PC with an AMD chip. If you had a Pentium 4, it was not unlikely you'd have a bad time due to the next problem.


Microsoft lied about the requirements for Vista. I can't remember details, but there was a huge scandal about computers that sold after Vista was announced were listed as "Vista Capable". I think there was even a case badge "certification"(Article - Computer World). If you were one of those people who had to spend a bunch of cash on a new PC and didn't buy high end, Microsoft could have potentially screwed you.

Basically, the listed minimum specs to run Vista were way off but for some reason Microsoft sold computers with inadequate specs as Vista Capable. This meant a lot of people upgraded to Vista who shouldn't have and got sub-par performance. Personally, I think this is a large part of why the hate for Vista was so widespread.

That's all I can remember from a technical standpoint. I honestly don't remember any feedback on the aesthetics.

i remember having mixed feelings about vista because i thought it was pretty. but it didn't run on my hardware that well until some updates later. i'm kinda glad i didn't know about widgets at the time because i would've went crazy and overloaded my computer with widgets until it significantly slowed down my system probably