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Comment by lproven

1 day 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.

> 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

> 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.