WinClient5270

I just tested GIMP 2.8.18 on Windows Vista, and it worked with zero issues. This installation of Vista is fully up to date, SP2 and the Platform Update and Supplement included. Have you updated your Vista install? Perhaps GIMP relies on updates to Vista in order to run properly. I didn't need to set any compatibility modes or anything, the installation ran normally without me having to do anything out of the ordinary. Your installer might also be faulty, and I'd suggest redownloading it and trying again. If it still doesn't work, and if your Vista system is up to date, you may need to reinstall Windows Vista. Screenshot of the latest GIMP working fine on Vista I'd like to learn more about this tool. How exactly does it work? I ran it and set the OS to Windows 7 SP1, but nothing happened. It also came with a .reg file, can you tell me exactly how this tool works and how to use it? It could come in handy in making new software install on Vista by overcoming OS blocks, if I'm understanding the purpose of this tool correctly. Thanks.

What exactly happened when you tried running the installer on Vista w/o compatibility mode? I am testing this right now as I have a VM of Windows Vista x64 available. If I experience these symptoms, I will include detailed information about it in the list. Perhaps this version just broke Vista compatibility and will be fixed in an update.

A combination of Windows XP having 6 years to prosper and gain a huge base of diehard users and therefore becoming the OS that users and developers alike became accustomed to, Vista requiring much more powerful hardware to run than XP, some vendors (namely NVIDIA) not properly testing their drivers on Vista before releasing them causing several unnecessary issues and blaming Microsoft/Vista for all of it, Vista initially suffering from a few bugs of its own (albeit fixed with later patches and SP1/2), Microsoft not properly stating the system requirements (512 MB of RAM for Vista? Yeah, right), the fact that Vista was essentially an almost complete rewrite coming from XP which caused compatibility issues with legacy software (albeit mostly fixed later on), and most importantly, once one group said Vista was bad, it became a chain reaction until pretty much everyone started knocking Vista- some that more than likely never even used the OS for themselves- which ensured that Vista failed. You're kidding yourself if you think you're going to be able to run any NT 6 OS out of the box optimally on anything less than 1 GB of RAM (and even that is pushing it), and in 2007, that was asking a lot. Although, if Microsoft had made 1 GB the minimum, I would bet that would've made Vista a bit of a better (in terms of performance) experience for users. Although, from my experience, service packs (and perhaps prior patches) eased the experience on lower end hardware, and brought performance up to par with Windows 7, and in some cases, performance has been even better on Vista SP2 than 7 for me and other users alike. Although, by the time Microsoft worked out all the kinks and developers got their act together by releasing Vista-ready drivers and software (or at least updated their software to support Vista), the damage had already been done, and Vista was forever known as a failure. Then, Windows 7 comes out, and everyone loves it, even though they don't realize that it's basically Windows Vista with a new name, new UI, and a few features to make it look like a completely different, new OS compared to Vista, when in reality, it's essentially the same thing- especially once Vista is fully patched. Anyway, I won't get too deep into the whole Longhorn/Vista story (since it's a HUGE one to tell), so time to get back on topic. Smeezekitty hasn't been online in over a month, although lately he's been coming online less frequently than usual. Perhaps if/when he sees this thread, he could solve these issues by stubbing the calls. I guess I should've been more specific; anyone that has the experience/knowledge to make Vista work with modern software/drivers doesn't care enough about it to make it happen, with Smeezekitty being one exception, although he might not be as experienced as Blackwingcat who seems to care more about Windows 2000 than anything (not saying there's anything wrong with that either, it's a great OS). At this point, we can only hope, you have to remember, Vista wasn't exactly universally loved by many, so it won't have as many enthusiasts that are willing to help it out as Windows 2000 or XP for example. Although, the fact that Windows ME has an unofficial service pack should warrant that Vista is bound to get something of that sort sooner or later.

Smeezekitty might be able to tell if the missing functions can be stubbed, and he may be able to stub them. Sadly, it doesn't seem anyone else cares about Vista

I'm glad that someone is starting to take interest in making modern drivers work on Windows Vista. Unfortunately, even NVIDIA recently stopped supporting Windows Vista as of driver version 365.19, and the new GTX 1000 series cards have no Vista drivers at all. I'm wondering if an INF mod to the Windows 7 RTM drivers would be sufficient to make the drivers work. Even if driver updates eventually put a stop to the INF modding method, at least there would be a working driver for the GTX 1000 series. I don't have any AMD cards to test drivers, but I do have a GTX 760. I may try the latest drivers on Vista when I get a chance, and report back with results, so at least NVIDIA users would also know where Vista compatibility stands on that boat. Unfortunately, even if modern GPUs had Vista drivers, you're going to be stuck with using either Ivy Bridge or FX series processors, because Intel Haswell and later just simply won't accept Vista in any shape or form, due to a bug that causes the boot process to fail (although not every time, it happens in about 1 in 5 reboots from my testing). I'm not sure exactly what happens, but somehow, the services just don't seem to start up in the correct order, and it causes the whole boot process to fail, which throws up the "Interactive logon process initialization has failed" error message. Changing numerous BIOS settings did nothing to fix this, and installing all the latest updates also didn't fix it. Hopefully someone on here will look into this issue and find out what is exactly causing the problem, because as it stands now, Vista is pretty much unusable on Haswell because of this.

Very nice skin. I have it applied on my 8.1 installation but I'm running into an issue. All non-ribbon windows use black text instead of white, which makes the title bar very difficult to read. I can see from your screenshot that all window title bars have white text. How exactly did you accomplish this? Thanks

I have attempted this before by simply changing any reference to Windows NT 6.1 (Win7) to 6.0 (Vista) in the .inf file. With Ivy Bridge, this method usually works. But with Haswell, I get varying errors when attempting to install the driver. The one I recall the most was Code 39. Unless someone who has the knowledge is willing to find out what dependencies are missing and is willing to add them somehow, Haswell's Vista support will remain incomplete. It isn't worth the trouble of using Vista on haswell anyway due to the aforementioned bugs.

Ah yes, can't believe I forgot that one since I used it on Vista quite a bit myself. Added to the list.

No problem, glad I could help. Good to know Cyberfox still works. Let me make sure of the absolute final version of Vivaldi for Vista, and I will add it to the list (EDIT: Vivaldi 1.0 stable is now added to the list). If you want a good Chromium based browser that supports Vista, I recommend Slimjet. They recently announced on their Facebook page that they can easily continue supporting Vista, XP too (but with a bit more work compared to Vista).

What versions of these pieces of software are you attempting to install? Adobe Reader hasn't supported Vista since version XI, so Reader DC will fail to install on it. Cyberfox recently stopped supporting Windows XP and Vista according to their site, but I am unsure exactly which version is the last one that works (EDIT: Their site says Vista and XP are unsupported, but I just ran the installer in Vista compatibility mode on Windows 7, it ran without issues, so perhaps it still works on Vista. When I get access to a Vista machine, I'll test it again and come back with results). Vivaldi 1.0 is the last version that will run on Vista, too. If you are trying to install Vista-compatible versions of the software, it may be blocked from running by default. Normally a dialogue box is supposed to appear to ask if you're sure you want to run the software, but I've had it refuse to run entirely before from time to time. To fix this: 1. Right-click on the file in Windows Explorer and select Properties. 2. Select the General tab of the file's properties sheet. 3. Click the Unblock button and then click OK.

Agreed. I've never used SBS 2008, but I'm sure it shares the same kernel and version number with Windows Vista, and I doubt that the drivers would work on it. I might test it when I have time since Microsoft offers a trial version for download just in case, but I doubt I'll have luck.

I tested on both Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP2 and Server 2008 Enterprise (v6.0.6002) and unfortunately, the driver refused to work on both OSes, so it's definitely geared towards Windows 7-based OSes, unless perhaps there are more differences between Windows SBS 2008 and Vista than we know about. Although, when I was studying the .inf file, I only saw a section for NTAMD.6.1, indicating that the driver is meant to work on Windows 7 only, unless I overlooked something.

The drivers will not work with Vista or Server 2008 (v6.0.6002, or Vista version). I attempted to install them a while back when I tested Vista on my Core i5 4460/ASUS H97M-E machine, and they refused to install. The .inf file also doesn't include an NT 6.0 section, only 6.1, indicating that Vista as a whole is not supported, only 7-based operating systems. Also, I attempted to change the version number in the .inf file, and it still wouldn't work. I was able to install chipset drivers, however, USB 3.0 and the onboard graphics drivers were unavailable for Vista.

Office 2010 is as far as you can go in Vista. If you want to run a newer version than that (and God knows I wouldn't), you'll have to upgrade to Windows 7 or later which will run even the latest Office 2016. I don't know of a way to get it for free either, but you can probably find 2010 for cheap(er) now since it's two versions old.

I'm not sure about 15.6, I have looked all over Google and cannot find it. However, I did manage to find 15.4 here which also works in Vista: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/amd-catalyst-15.4.1-beta.aspx I would also ask on smeezekitty's "omega on Vista" thread, as someone there may have it (15.6) archived.

I really believe Google is intentionally crippling Chrome for Vista now. Here's Chrome 50 running on Windows 7 in Vista compatibility mode: http://prntscr.com/asf064 (Yes, it looks like Vista, but it's just a theme on Windows 7. To prove it, I opened IE11 which doesn't work on Vista, and you can clearly see the Windows 7 build number in CMD) and the same behavior occurs as if you were running it on the real Vista. It appears to me that once Chrome detects the OS as anything below Windows 7, it falls back to this crippled codepath and refuses to function properly. The only way to make it work would require fooling it into believing the OS was Windows 7, so it would run the Windows 7 version of Chrome instead of this crippled code, if that makes sense. That would probably be feasible on Windows Vista since it's essentially the same OS as 7, but as for XP, it would take more work I'm sure, if it's even possible.

http://prntscr.com/arftjc Sadly, it isn't working. Pages just simply won't load, and on top of that, aero is still not working. Thanks for your work regardless, and I hope you're at least able to get it working for Vista users in the future. It seems to me that it would be possible to get the Windows 7 version of Chrome working under Vista since the two OSes are extremely similar. Vista with the platform update should be able to handle it. I don't see it happening with XP without a ton of rework, though. P.S., for reference, I also included Chrome 40 in my screenshot since it's the last version that *properly* supported Vista before the whole XP alignment set of events took place.

Do you know whether or not aero works on Vista? Normally instead of using the native UI like it used to do before v41, it just uses the XP theme because basically, it's just the XP version of chrome running on Vista. I've heard that there's some lines of code you can remove to remove that restriction as someone did it on the Chromium forums a while back before Google dropped Vista support. Link (see comment #68): https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=451733#c68 This whole situation is very strange. When I ran Chrome on Windows 7 in Vista compatibility mode, it behaved very similarly to the screenshot that I posted above. It refused to load web pages, and I know for a fact that Windows 7 can't be missing anything to make chrome work properly. Is Google intentionally crippling Chrome now for XP and Vista to prevent users from making attempts to run it like this?

I would be glad to give it a try, I have Vista running on several machines. Thank you for your work.

Funnily enough, Google Chrome 51 Dev will run in Windows Vista, but pages won't load. I'm not sure if it's because I had to manually copy the program files over from Windows 7 and the program doesn't work properly without the installer, or if Vista is missing something to make it work properly. Either way, evidently, there's some sort of XP codepath "fallback" still there, since DWM still isn't utilized:

It would be great if you could somehow comment out the lines that disable aero glass for Vista users too. As I'm sure you're aware, about a year ago, Google was having to decide between aligning the Vista Chrome version with either that of Windows 7 or Windows XP, because continuing to develop the Vista-exclusive version of Chrome was becoming more difficult due to the lack of feedback coming from end users, while XP and 7 still had tons of feedback and users by comparison. While a fully updated Vista is more than likely capable of handling the Windows 7 version, earlier versions of Vista (SP1 and RTM) aren't equipped with the necessary APIs to make the Windows 7 version of Chrome work unless you install several updates, and I suppose Google was either too lazy to implement a check for these updates in the installer itself, or they simply didn't have the time to implement the code. There was a point in time where Chromium was taking the Windows 7 path on Vista SP2, whereas on older versions, it would take the XP path (I tested this myself back then, I'm pretty sure it was Chrome 41 beta). Anyway, we all know that Google ultimately ended up aligning the Chrome code with XP across all Vista versions, and one side effect of this was the loss of aero glass. Many users complained on the Chromium forums about this, and it looks hideous and out of place on Vista. I wouldn't doubt if Vista could run the Windows 7 version of Chrome as long as its fully updated, because the two OSes are extremely similar. I believe Google dropped Vista support out of laziness more than anything, because it shouldn't be hard to develop software that runs on both Vista and 7. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

I know. That would be amazing to have, but looking at Vista's poor reputation and low usage, I doubt anyone here would even care about doing it. Although I do have Windows 7 looking very much like Vista which is good, but it's not the same as the real deal.

You'd think that in order to qualify for the "legacy" label, Vista would have to be unsupported by Microsoft completely first. But I guess considering how the third party support of Vista has fallen like it has, it doesn't really make much of a difference.

I will add X99 after I see someone testing it with Vista with no problems. The issue is also existent with Z97, not just H97: http://www.vistax64.com/general-discussion/304098-logon-process-initialization-failure-vista-ultimate-x64.html That's most probably affecting your own chipset (H97) though, not verified if it exists in other LGA 1150 boards too, but X99 isn't affected by the issue at all. You could just add X99 for now for the high end i7s and Xeons that are LGA 2011-v3, and search on other 1150 boards that have the issue existent in 7 at least. If they do, then those who want Haswell and Vista should go with X99. If they don't, then H97 is the only chipset that gets affected.

But there is a software timing issue with Windows Vista and haswell that causes it to not boot up half the time, and some services fail to start. Unless Microsoft or intel release a hotfix, I cannot guarantee that Vista will work properly with haswell. I will add EVGA as an exception for Vista, but again, whether or not that timing bug will appear I cannot tell. It could only affect H97 (which is what I tested Vista on), but I doubt it. Specific errors you'll see: Just before the Startup Orb animation appears, you'll get an error that says "Interactive Logon Process Initialization has failed. Consult the event log for more details". Upon clicking Ok, sometimes Windows will proceed with the boot up process, and sometimes it won't. Usually, when it does, after you logon, some services fail to start. The one I saw most often was Windows Defender, and sometimes Windows Audio. If you experience any of these problems, the only solution as of right now is to upgrade to Windows 7 SP1 or later, where the problem is non-existent.