Comment by ch_123
8 hours ago
I remember switching my Windows computers from XP to the alpha releases of Windows 7 (back around late 2008/early 2009), and noticing improved stability. I remember needing to reinstall Windows at least once a year with XP, which was something I never needed to do with Windows 7 and onwards. This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it.
Your mileage may have varied, and all that.
> This may have been true for Vista once it stabilized, but I had a very poor experience with Vista around the time it first came out (particularly with BSODs relating to Nvidia drivers), and ended up skipping over it.
I remember buying one of the first AMD Turion X2 laptops with an ATI GPU (Acer Ferrari 5000?). Initially came with XP, but I installed Vista 64-bit on it (courtesy of my college's MSDN subscriptions) several months after release. XP BSODed about once per month under normal use, but with Vista, it never did. Everything I tried to use it with worked, it was fast enough and looked great! (The start menu's search bar was a killer feature for me! back when Windows search worked...) My college issued everyone Thinkpads, and when they had a Vista-based image, I got it, and my experience with Vista on that was likewise.
I built a gaming desktop a while later and put Vista on it, and it had occasional BSODs. I also suspect the Nvidia drivers, but I recall that stability improved with Windows 7.
For those reasons, I seem to be 1 of about 3 people on earth that has a mildly positive opinion about Windows Vista.
That's fair, and I suspect that if I either A) had a different hardware configuration at the time or B) had tried Vista about a year later than I did, I may have ended up with an entirely different opinion of it.