Comment by kwanbix
11 days ago
It delivered a terrible user experience. The interface was ugly, with a messy mix of old and new UI elements, ugly icons, and constant UAC interruptions. On top of that, the minimum RAM requirements were wrong, so it was often sold on underpowered PCs, which made everything painfully slow.
Everything you said was perfectly applicable (and then some!) to Windows XP, Windows 7, or Windows 10 at launch or across their lifecycle. Let me shake all those hearsay based revelations you think you had.
Windows XP's GUI was considered a circus and childish [1] and the OS had a huge number of compatibility and security issues before SP3. The messy mix of elements is still being cleaned up 15 years later in Windows 11 and you can still find bits from every other version scattered around [2]. UAC was just the same in Windows 7.
Hardware requirements for XP were astronomical compared to previous versions. Realistic RAM requirements [3] for XP were 6-8 times higher than Win 98/SE (16-24MB) and 4 times those of Windows 2000 (32MB). For CPU, Windows 98 ran on 66MHz 486 while XP crawled on Pentium 233MHz as a bare minimum. Windows 98 used ~200MB of disk space while XP needed 1.5GB.
Windows 7 again more than quadrupled all those requirements to 1/2GB or RAM, 1GHz CPU, and 16-20GB disk space.
But yeah, you keep hanging on to those stories you heard about Vista (and don't get me wrong, it wasn't good, but you have no idea why or how every other edition stacked up).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/12itfx...
[2] https://github.com/Lentern/windows-11-inconsistencies
[3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
I’ve been using Windows since version 3.0, so I know what I’m talking about.
Vista peaked at around 25% market share and then declined. The lowest peak of any major Windows release. Compare that with Windows XP at 88%, Windows 7 at 61%, or Windows 10 at 82%. Why do you think that is? Because Vista was great and people just didn’t understand it?
Windows XP was already perfectly usable by SP1, not SP3. The UI was childish looking, but you could easily make it look and behave like Windows 2000 very easily.
Vista, on the other hand, was bad at launch and never really recovered. I very clearly remember going to friends’ and family members’ homes to upgrade them from Vista to Windows 7, and the difference was night and day.
> so I know what I’m talking about
Your arguments don't show it and if you have to tell me you know what you're talking about, you don't. It's tiresome to keep shooting down your cherry picked arguments.
> Vista peaked at around 25% market share and then declined.
Then IE was the absolute best browser of all times with its 95+% peak. And Windows Phone which was considered at the time a very good mobile OS barely reached low single digit usage. If you don't know how to put context around a number you'll keep having this kind of "revelation".
You're also comparing the usage of an OS which was rebranded after 2.5 years, with the peak reached years later by OSes that kept their name for longer. After 2.5-3 years XP had ~40% and Win7 ~45%, better but far from the peak numbers you wave. If MS kept the Vista name Win7 might as well have been Vista SP2/3, and people would have upgraded just like they always did. But between the bad image and antitrust lawsuits based on promises MS made linked to the Vista name, they rebranded.
When XP was launched users had no accessible modern OS alternative, XP only had to compete with its own shortfalls. When Vista was launched it had to compete not only with an established and mature XP with already 75% of the market but soon after also with the expectation of the hyped successor. Windows 7 also had to compete with an even more mature and polished XP which is why it never reached the same peaks as XP or 10. Only Windows 10 had a shot at similar heights because by then XP was outdated and retired... And because MS forced people to upgrade against their will, which I'm sure you also remembered when you were typing the numbers.
> Windows XP was already perfectly usable by SP1, not SP3
And less then usable until then, which is anyway a low bar. You were complaining of the interface, the messy mix of old and new UI elements, minimum requirements, these were never fixed. XP's security was a dumpster fire and was partially fixed much later. Plain XP was not good, most of the target Win9x users had no chance of upgrading without buying beefy new computers, GUI was seen as ugly and inconsistent, compatibility was poor (that old HW that only had W9x drivers?), security was theater. Exactly what you complained about Vista. Usable, but still bad.
Just like XP, Vista became usable with SP1, and subsequently even good with "SP Win7".
You remember Vista against a mature XP, some cherry picked moments in time. And if your earlier comments tell me anything, you don't remember early XP at all. You remember fondly Windows 10 from yesterday, not Windows 10 from 2015 when everyone was shooting at it for the "built in keylogger spying on you", forced updates, advertising in the desktop, ugly interface made for touchscreens, etc. Reached 80% usage anyway, which you'll present as proof that people loved all that in some future conversation when you'll brag that you were using computers since transistors were made of wood.
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