Comment by 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
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.
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
> 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.
>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.
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.)
I’d already switched away, but 7 seemed like the peak in an absolute sense. XP might have been the biggest relative improvement or the best normalized to the competition, but Windows 7 was the last version before development started going backwards.
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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.
XP has had shadow copies. File history tab in explorer was first available in Server 2003, but AFAIK there was a hack to enable it in XP, too.
All hail the mysterious system slowdowns caused by volume shadow copy.
Yeah, especially when shutting down. I think it went bananas if a second shadow copy was triggered while the first was still going
Still, it is an underappreciated technology even today, the ability to get a consistent/ incremental point in time backup
It's not like they got rid of shadow copy entirely so I don't know why they got rid of the file restoration UI
I'll be sad when they finally kill off wbadmin, I script that for nightly imaging to an external drive. I get multiple snapshots to restore to, I can mount the backups (vhdx) as a disk for quick-and-dirty access, and it is technically possible to do point in time file restore but in typical Microsoft fashion it's artificially limited, I've had to fire up an evaluation copy of Windows Server in a VM to do it. Argh
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