I have to disagree, Vista was indeed a horrible OS. Hated it for multiple reasons.
1. Memory management was terrible (at least, to me it was). It took over 2 (or was it 3?) GB of Ram for it to run decently in the slightest; Win7 was much more efficient. On top of that, one of my friend's games was leaking memory only in Vista (yes, he was calling delete), where XP didn't have that problem.
2. Compatibility was terrible in some regards (once again, it was for me).
3. Very insecure and easily hackable. A guy from Somalia demonstrated this by hacking my laptop remotely and pointed out multiple vulnerabilities which made it a prime choice for hackers and those with malicious intent.
4. Buggy and sometimes downright broken kernel level APIs. I don't remember the exact functions off hand, but certain functions were supposed to fail under certain conditions. Either Microsoft's programmers forgot to check their kernel API revisions, or they just didn't care.
There were a few upsides to Vista (mainly the networking interface being much better than XPs) and it could be exploited to your advantage due to it's absurd weaknesses, but overall, I gladly went back to XP and had less problems with ME.
Shogun.
So basically a mix of annectotal evidence and things you can't seem to remember? Vista was like any other Windows, a technical improvement over it's predecessor (regardless of UI changes, for example some hated 8 but it was still a technical improvement over 7) and wildly hated due to crappy oem support at launch, i ran it from day 1 (like every Windows since the start) and had zero issues all along just like with any other Windows past 98's famed BSODs except on vista i was Lucky i had supported hardware as there wasn't that much of it at release.
For 1 it didn't take any more ram than previous versions, it used up more which was good, it freed it when you needed it. It did use a little more for visual candy but you were better off disabling that instead of going back to a previous version, keeping all the technical advantage and having the same look/perf.
For 2 do you mean hardware (where i have to agree especially at release) or software (where i can agree for the first few months, it wasn't exactly a clean releases compared to other Windows and people didn't give it another shot later on)?
For 3 and that vulnerability wasn't in XP? Was it disclosed publicly? Were you up to date? Vulnerabilities that are disclosed and unpatched have been "very" rare for a long time on all Windows versions.
For 4 it's hard to argue against without examples.
Well, whether you like it or not, a consistent pattern of anecdotal evidence is enough to draw a logical conclusion or theory at least. It might have worked fine for you, but that doesn't mean it didn't have various problems for others.
1. Yes, it did. The amount of ram required to run it smoothly was a rather big leap compared to XP. Once again, even Win7 ran smoother on that and less. I liked the new UI and thought that it was great. To be fair, at least in Vista, you can get the OS running on a very small number of processes if you know how to do it.
2. Software. Had issues with multiple software dev packages, including Visual Studio, and the Xbox SDK. There were also issues with audio recording in this certain program I used to record videos. To be fair, I can't expect certain stuff to work forever. I only ran Vista on my laptop (which came with the OS), so all the hardware drivers and whatnot were OEM provided. Tbh, I think the hardware aspect was decent. Drivers were never an issue like they were for XP64 (driver wise, Vista was an improvement over XP64 IMO).
3. Never said it wasn't in XP. He was demonstrating to me how easy it was to hack Vista due to all the security holes. I'm not arguing for WinXP in this regard.
4. Since it's been years since I've dealt with this, I can't remember every last function off the top of my head. Many of these I discovered during my time in the emulation scene (you might recognize my nick from there; and if you do, you'll likely know which project I'm talking about). One was with NtAllocateVirtualMemory. Under certain conditions, this function is supposed to fail. In this case, incompatible flags. Somehow, MEM_ROTATE (it's not on MSDN) was thrown into the mix of flags, and isn't compatible with other combinations, thus supposed to fail, with the appropriate error message telling us why. XP and 7+ does this, but Vista does not. Instead, it gives us a false success leading to incorrect results and making it harder to track. Others included threading and synchronization functions which did not always behave as intended. Me and another guy were looking into this, and eventually found out why this happens ONLY on Vista and not any other OS. He explained in detail what the issues and offending functions were, but it was 5 or 6 years ago, so I don't remember exactly (would love to dig it up again for the sake of this thread though). Although these bugs appeared to work in our favour at the moment, but in reality, it was a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up in our faces. Now, you might respond to this saying "it's your fault for writing crappy code, and you should be aware of the risks and what not". Yes, but that's not the point. If the OS doesn't behave as documented, then it's hard to track those issues until you run code on an OS that does it properly.
I'm not saying there weren't any good things about Vista, but overall I wouldn't go back to it willingly. Same goes for WinME. It got a bad rep, but even I got it to work properly without crashing after applying the fixes and patches.
(regardless of UI changes, for example some hated 8 but it was still a technical improvement over 7)
Btw, I wasn't talking about the UI changes. That I embraced, even in Win8 because I liked Metro. I'm talking about the flaws from a software perspective.
Shogun.
