Comment by kwanbix
1 day 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.