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Comment by vjvjvjvjghv

13 hours ago

MS had a pretty good thing going with 2000 and then XP. They they put a lot of effort into destroying that first with Vista and then Windows 8. I feel Windows has never recovered from there.

20 comments

vjvjvjvjghv

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stetrain  12 hours ago

Early XP had a pretty rough time with security especially before the service packs.

Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family.

Vista was much better in that regard but had issues in performance of the UI (chasing compositing interfaces that Mac and Linux had for years before) and the annoyance of UAC. Both were good ideas but required buy-in from hardware and software vendors that was slow to arrive.

  • BirAdam  3 hours ago

    I think people forget just how different the world was at the time. In 2001, most people were not always connected, online-first wasn't even a possibility, printers were a big deal, computers still shipped with floppy disk drives, and security usually referred more to physical security than network.

  • steve1977  7 hours ago

    > Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family.

    I remember the regular cleaning sessions I had to do for my mother. Which stopped once I got her a Mac mini.

anonymars  10 hours ago

Vista was an enhancement of XP. We got search in the start menu and made it a first class part of the OS with the indexer

WDM made graphics driver crashes not take down the OS plus no more window tearing

Shadow copies gave you file history (time machine without another drive)

No more running with full admin privileges all the time. Bitlocker was introduced

Yes, compatibility issues affected people to various degrees, and yes it required good hardware to run well. Intel's onboard graphics / 5400 rpm drives we're not kind to it. And there were too many editions

With good hardware Vista was peak Windows. I could go back to Vista but I couldn't go back to XP, there's too much we take for granted now

  • lproven  4 hours ago

    This is all true, but the price was too high for me.

    > WDM made graphics driver crashes not take down the OS plus no more window tearing

    It made it more stable, I don't care about tearing and stuff, but it robbed me of full-screen DOS windows and the ability to toggle a window to/from full-screen with Alt+Enter. I used that a lot.

    > Shadow copies gave you file history (time machine without another drive)

    But it's no use if the OS isn't stable enough to trust. So I kept my important stuff on servers, so lost this.

    The same applies to openSUSE today.

    > No more running with full admin privileges all the time.

    A small win, for standalone machines.

    > Bitlocker was introduced

    https://xkcd.com/538/

    Life is too short.

    > yes it required good hardware to run well.

    Never mind that. Nothing except the highest-end premium kit had the specs to run it well. You needed 2GB of RAM for half decent performance but new kit was shipping with 512MB.

    > With good hardware Vista was peak Windows.

    Nah. Not as bad as generally held, but not great.

    > I could go back to Vista but I couldn't go back to XP, there's too much we take for granted now

    I did:

    https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/dangerous_pleasures_w...

    It was glorious.

    • anonymars  3 hours ago

      I want to point out about Bitlocker, it makes it easier to get rid of old drives safely and less problematic to lose a laptop. $5 wrench doesn't apply

    • Anthony-G  3 hours ago

      > https://xkcd.com/538/

      I’m a big fan of XKCD but, in reality, what most people (and employers) worry about is unauthorised third-party access to private data in the event a laptop is lost or stolen (most often by opportunist theft). Bitlocker — and other Full Disk Encryption technology — provide an effective mitigation for this situation.

  • FirmwareBurner  8 hours ago

    >Vista was an enhancement of XP.

    It really wasn't. You can say XP was an enhancement of 2000, but Vista was it's own thing, they reworked a lot of the NT Kernel and moved stuff like audio and video drivers from kernel space to user space, which brough increased security and stability, but broke compatibility on hardware that didn't bring updated drivers which pissed off a lot of early adopters of vista.

    • EvanAnderson  6 hours ago

      Vista was, arguably, the unofficial beta for Windows 7. Just about everything they tried and failed to execute properly in Vista worked well in 7. (Similar story for 8 vs 8.1-- or more appropriately Server 2012 vs. 2012 R2.)

      2 replies →

    • finaard  6 hours ago

      Funny thing is that NT originally had video drivers in user space exactly for security/stability reasons, but moved it into kernel space with NT4 for performance reasons.