OneSerendipity

As far as I know, Ivy Bridge-E supports Vista completely, as X79 boards have Vista drivers, due to them having to provide support for Sandy Bridge as well. Older Sandy chipsets for motherboards like H61 may have been updated to keep Ivy support, thus you will definitely get Vista drivers in them as well. But on newer chipsets released for both platforms like Z77, Windows 7 and above may be actually required (or XP too, but Vista can be out of the question).

If I remember correctly, such companies support a product during the mainstream support period of its life. That is, for example, Vista, whose mainstream ended in April 2012. Which means, Sandy would be the last architecture to support it, while XP's finished in 2009, yet they still made compatible architectures for it, not sure if Ivy is the last to do so though.

I use an Ivy Bridge laptop at home, and yeah, even the only existing HD 4000 driver for Vista is not that good as it could be. Ivy is a very troubled platform for Vista. Ivy did support XP though, and the 7 series chipset drivers work in both it and Vista as well. Don't expect anything from USB 3.0 though; only for 7 and above. I'm not sure if Haswell does anything for this, though the most compatible boards would be Z97/X99 ones, specifically from brands like MSI, ASRock, Asus... They worked with Windows 2000 in here (although modded drivers of course), how wouldn't they work with Vista? The last platform officially supporting Vista completely was Sandy Bridge, and it remains the most stable one in my opinion. Ivy hasn't been a good platform for me, it was actually a step back. I want to use Vista as much as I can before it completely dies, because 7 has its drawbacks as well, though not as many as 8 and above do.

Sure it will, haha In my 7 machines (physical or virtual), I just get all updates until March 2015, remove all suspicious ones and then install. Then I can disable Windows Update completely, as MS doesn't provide good enough support for me now anyways. Updates do more harm than good now, and this hasn't been more true with another OS than 7 and 8.1.

I was using Server 2003 as a main OS up until some months ago, where I decided to remove it and stick to 2008 (original, not R2). The last OSes I'd use are 7/2008 R2, as they don't have those awful flat looks 8 and above have, they are still well-behaved with mods, unlike the newer versions, and they don't want to spy on my system that much as 10 does (well, say that as if I'm not getting any updates after March 2015 and Windows Update disabled). I have Vista running on both of my computers, and it still runs like the wind, as it won't get affected by the spyware updates 7 and 8.1 get right now, and its performance is better on my laptop than 7's. I'll install 7 on another partition and work around the issues it gets, though. It's true that XP and above have included more bloatware, though some of their features are actually very useful, and the way some newer OSes like Vista handle the computer is pretty good too. Windows 2000 is still a great OS, and it felt a lot more stable than 9x back in the day, it didn't suffer from those lots of crashes 9x had.

Try installing KB3139852 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=51265 for 32-bit systems, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=51329 for 64-bit) to fix Windows Update's slow update checking up, and then try installing IE9 from Windows Update itself. It should be in the important updates section. There's nothing else I can recommend, an English IE9 would be only existent in an English version of Vista actually.

I have experienced the same exact issue with my Vista installations too, and nothing seems to fix it. I guess they have put the servers which have the 10 downloads on priority and thus why Vista's could be too late to deliver the updates.

Well, I installed 7 again yesterday, but due to a mistake I did to the OS, I had to reinstall again and got Vista SP1 again. Seriously, it runs better than any other OS in here, even those it was supposed to run great on, like 7 and 8. Just, I'd like to get the Ivy USB 3 drivers working in NT 6.0, at least for now. Vista still wins. If only it would get lots of community support, this would help it stay on the top for a while.

I mean, do you have another operating system apart from Windows 8 installed in the same computer, that is already affected from the issue this update fixes, like 8.1 or Server 2012/R2?

I read some info about KB3138962... it seems it's something affecting clients too, and it's not restricted to server features (media features being affected). Do you have more than an OS in your current computer installed, and if you do, is it any of those being affected? If yes, try installing the update in there. By the way, I found KB3135989 for Server 2012 in here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=51475

I can't guess anything else, even though I have done some mods to themes myself. It seems 8.1 has modified the theme system quite a bit from the original 8.0 release. I can't really help more either, as I don't use 8/2012 anywhere at the moment, now running Vista in my two computers as the main OS.

Most of the issues with XP would appear in x64 actually, as it has never really got that great driver support, although my work computer would run Server 2003 x64 just fine.

I agree on this. I've said it somewhere else before... Windows 10, if it's marketed as "free", it isn't. In that case, something paid is not with money, but privacy. You pay something more invaluable for such an awful piece of software than just some bucks. You become MS's hamster which they experiment on, when you decide to get W10 in your computer. It seemed very weird to me. Every other successful version of Windows has been a paid one. Why would they do the change in here? Since money doesn't grow on trees, they probably thought about programming some telemetry in their "free" OS and send all that data to others, thus get the money from there. The average consumer is not aware of what happens in the background of their computer with W10 now, but that PC having had an older version before. Should that be the case, they'll find out that their bandwidth is much slower than what it was before, and then get to search for info for 10 online. There will be the time where they'll realize that it has been sending their computer data silently, along with other annoyances and return back, probably... As for their way of marketing 10, it's only going to damage the company itself. Seriously, they have never marketed another OS so much, and even using some of the most spastic ways to get users to upgrade to it. I remember last time, I saw a post somewhere that they said Windows 7 is almost 10 years old, and that x64 didn't exist back then, but that it isn't secure either. I mean, look how much they can exaggerate and tease people. 7 is barely 7 years old and security is still great in it, and x64 existed since 2003. That forced upgrade on 7 and 8.1 users too... Really? They won't even ask the user if they want to install the OS when they decide to get it, because they may have regretted getting it or something. The only options you get are either upgrade now or upgrade later (and this one has a deadline of 3 days), but not "don't upgrade". If they're going to keep it like this for long enough, then they won't see a bright future in their market, I'm sure.

In Windows 6.1 & 6.3 OSes, I would avoid updating my system with updates after March 2015, due to getting those Win10 notifications in the clients by accident, and generally I get nothing extra to call really important from those right now. Systems updated up to that date shouldn't be missing on anything in security, provided they have an updated antivirus and firewall too.

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.

I even found some Z97 motherboard drivers for Vista, by EVGA again: http://prntscr.com/aafrnt You can't say Haswell completely doesn't support it, since it's only some specific companies and chipsets (and mostly chipsets) that don't. Even so, probably unofficial support is in those 7 drivers for such boards from other companies like MSI too.

Mine with Vista Ultimate SP2 x64 got 1332.3, 2D Graphics Mark is 543 (the home laptop I have).

For some reason Chrome feels better when browsing websites, hence why I still use it in Vista, though Firefox is the one that will still support it... YouTube, for example, runs much better in Chrome in here than Firefox, but there won't be any other option than upgrade to 7/2008 R2, or stay with kinda "degraded in performance" software or unsupported ones.

Yeah, 2000 and 7 actually got liked at the time of their release, unlike XP and Vista... well, XP got to have 80% market share in computers around 2006-07 though, which is something that won't be beat anytime soon. Windows 7 is still on around 53-56%, and it has fallen a bit, due to people upgrading to 10 and 8.1.

I have a crappy computer at home, so I can't really test them, my work one should though.... still, I'd rather keep that away from 6.2, and stay on 6.0 until support for it ends for good.

As far as I know, XP wasn't really liked until SP2 came out. I had the chance to live on the then current days of even 3.1, let alone NT 4.0 and 2000. There's a reason why MS marketed XP as NT 5.1 and not 6.0, like Vista did. It was exactly like 2000 with just some extra eye-candy stuff. As for myself, I never really got to use XP as my main OS, as I preferred using its server counterpart, Server 2003, much more.

Check X99 for Haswell processors though, there is still some Vista driver support for X99 chipsets and motherboards (at least EVGA does support it completely, maybe not USB 3.0/3.1 drivers).

Does it really work that faster than 8? I guess you don't turn on all those desktop experience features that 8 has enabled by default, do you? Because, Server 2012 hasn't worked really any faster than 8 for me, since when 2008 R2 was released, performance between the client and server OSes is similar, with Desktop Experience enabled. Server 2003 and 2008 had some differences compared to their client counterparts... 2003 would run better than XP (comparing x86 now, x64 is another story), and 2008 R1 has some performance increases when compared to Vista, but that's all of it. I don't know about CC 2013's features and performance either, but I'd rather stick to CS5/CS6 in the Adobe apps I use.

I'm glad Windows 8 performs very well for you. 7 feels a bit slower than both Vista and 8 in some parts, like Aero, and browsing files sometimes. I'm glad my advice helped. Good luck with the OS you want to run.

Well, indeed 8 feels better than 8.1 on some parts, and if I couldn't use 7 for some special reason, I'd be at least on 8 with Server 2012 updates. Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 just fits my needs more, and I won't upgrade to either from Vista/2008 R1 unless I really feel I need to upgrade. My upcoming home rig will probably not going to have NT 6.2 installed either.