Comment by anonymars
2 days 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
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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>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.
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.
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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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.
> 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.
That's an exaggeration. I didn't have the highest-end premium kit. I had good hardware (I was a gamer after all), but I doubt very much if I had more than 2 GB memory and I ran Vista with zero performance issues whatsoever.
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
So does ABAN and it's a lot quicker and easier and has zero effect on performance.
https://aban.derobert.net/
ABAN is the modern free replacement for DBAN once that went payware.
> 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.
Well, yes, we know that. I mean, that is the reason for doing it.
But what is much more rarely discussed are the costs. There are multiple penalties.
It hurts performance.
It impedes dual-boot.
It impedes setup in general; you lose most of the nice friendly GUI tools, replaced by clunky harder CLI tools.
It makes data recovery vastly harder, which is one of those things people discount until they need it and then realise how critical it is.
It makes troubleshooting OS problems vastly harder. Many it simply prevents: the answer becomes, reinstall your OS and restore from backup. If you have no backups, tough.
It's inconvenient, unless you use modern TPM-backed systems, in which case it dramatically reduces the security benefits, while also severely reducing OS compatibility.
It adds a new vital credential people don't know they have and don't know they need to keep secure backups of.
It generally makes everything worse, to fix a threat that most people simply do not have.
The 2 employers I personally had who insisted on it published all the company info on my machines to Github anyway, making it not even security theatre. More like security pantomime: an act of pretending to pretend to do something.
The answer to all this is, in my experience as tech support type: don't do it. Conduct a proper analysis of who has what secrets and what they need to keep, and use other better-targeted tools just for them.
Because without that, it causes problems for no good reason. It's treated as a panacea but it isn't -- it fixes nothing for 99% of users -- and the very real problems and issues it causes are ignored.
This _may_ be worth it for some companies and organisations but it's not for anyone else. I can see its worth for governments and military forces but few others.
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