I'm Depressed About Windows

[NoelC]

For me Vista was the first OS that would stand up to serious use and run virtually forever.  XP needed rebooting from time to time, even though I had a well-configured XP x64 that was very stable.  I don't think I could run XP for a week without a reboot.

 

Some other things came to mind...

 

Click Start, type the name of the application you want to run.

 

Desktop composition, which eliminated a lot of the nasty flickering and turned the desktop into something smooth and professional.

 

Improvements to the common controls that made using the desktop all the more integrated.

 

GPU acceleration.

 

Much smoother multitasking capability.  The kernel didn't bog down as much under the pressure of one or a few intensive tasks.

 

Personally I like cascading menus, so I have to thank XP and its parents for that.  But that you could opt to use the "Classic" style for the start menu in Vista was a great thing about that later system.  None of this modern OMG, you can't possibly want to do THAT any more, it's SO out of fashion.

 

But let's not also forget that Vista introduced one of the worst ideas in the long, sad history of bad ideas:  UAC

 

-Noel

Edited December 30, 2014 by NoelC

[jaclaz]

I am of course missing something, but it seems to me like you both listed mainly some "added convenience" in starting programs and in "bettered looks" of the GUI, i.e. something that has been traditionally available even on 2K or XP using alternate shells.

 

@NoelC

You have a point on the "better handling" of multitasking, though .

Your experience is however a little bit more positive than the "general" one most probably because you ran the Vista on adequate (top of the notch at the time) hardware, whilst the vast majority of "common people" had it on underpowered hardware (that was probably the biggest mistake the good MS guys - together with the big OEM's - made at the time, pushing the OS on everyone, even on low-end machines that simply had not the "juice" to run it adequately).

 

Still, you are among the few people that experienced an increased stability of the OS as everyone else reported issues in real life until SP1 (which I will re-state how it was released too late, in 2008), and this - to certain extent applies - to the increase in graphic performance, at least according to reports I have seen.

 

 

About the stability AFAIK Windows XP 64 bit has traditionally been one of the less stable OS around (from hearsay, never run one personally), most probably not because of itself (as the 32 bit - please read as "a bettered Windows 2000, only slightly worse" - is/was, just like it's predecessors, very stable) but rather because of the early 64 bit drivers which were rather flaky.

 

It is clear that we have different metrics for "stable" I count the time between needing to reboot in months or years, an OS that needs a reboot a week is like "very, very, very unstable" in my view. (in other words, should I have installed it for test, it wouldn't have lasted till the second or third week).

 

jaclaz

[NoelC]

XP x64 worked fine in the time it did not leak its resources dry.  That's what I meant by stable.

 

Stable for the long-term, I agree - if it doesn't run the whole time between reboots mandated by e.g., Windows Updates then it's not acceptable.  I've been experiencing that since Vista x64, which admittedly I did not adopt until after SP1 was released.  Perhaps that explains my good experience.

 

I actually find myself disappointed when an update requires a reboot nowadays, as I'd love to see how long it could go.

 

-Noel

[JorgeA]

That reminds me of something else that I meant to include on my list. It may not (or may) qualify for jaclaz's "fundamentally relevant" requirement, but I find that the process of downloading and installing Windows Updates is significantly more reliable with Vista (and 7) than on the XP systems I've used. Usually the Updates process works (worked) fine on XP, but every so often the updates would have a way of being announced, then mysteriously disappearing off the face of the planet when I clicked on the little yellow shield in the Notification Area to get them. Not even going to the WU website would reveal them. Very strange.

 

--JorgeA

[jaclaz]

 I've been experiencing that since Vista x64, which admittedly I did not adopt until after SP1 was released.  Perhaps that explains my good experience.

 

I actually find myself disappointed when an update requires a reboot nowadays, as I'd love to see how long it could go.

 

-Noel

Yep, that's it.

 

Vista SP1, hard as it may seem to say so , is/was a good OS, most if not all the issues were solved in the 13 (that is thirteen or one month more than one whole year) months between the release of the OS and the (much needed) release of the Service Pack.

 

@JorgeA

Well, that is a nice thing, but as you suspect not particularly relevant, as a matter of fact, I have seen too many issues (no matter with which OS or platform) with "automatic updates" to consider the whole thing "a feature", it is at most a "commodity", something that may be *needed* but that I find it a noticeable weak point of *any* system.

Recent related talk:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/172455-windows-8-81-connection-tweaks/

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/172455-windows-8-81-connection-tweaks/#entry1084073

And don't forget the:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/158104-service-pack-2-for-w7

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/158104-service-pack-2-for-w7/?p=1018124

 

And again, I see no actual "competition" or "contrast" in having BOTH models, a "continuous updates" feature (which a savvy user will however need to keep under manual control) and the periodical release of "major" comprehensive updates (please read as Service Packs), the current model in my simplicity is not bad for the single user and possibly not bad for the large enterprise users (which will have an IT technician and likely a local deployment service) but the idea that in a typical 5 to 30 PC office every single PC will connect to get from MS the same bytes 5 or 30 times sounds to me like - to say the least - not smart.

 

jaclaz

[NoelC]

I imagine the "forward thinkers", when helping plan what to implement (or what to delete, which is more likely lately) advise not to worry about network bandwidth.  "Think of it as a freely available commodity." and "It's a network problem, not an OS problem."

 

Microsoft apparently thinks its machinery can support some billions of users directly.

 

-Noel

[JorgeA]

 

@JorgeA

Well, that is a nice thing, but as you suspect not particularly relevant, as a matter of fact, I have seen too many issues (no matter with which OS or platform) with "automatic updates" to consider the whole thing "a feature", it is at most a "commodity", something that may be *needed* but that I find it a noticeable weak point of *any* system.

 

I don't allow my computers to do automatic Windows updates, I always set them to tell me when they become available and then to let me download and install them when I choose. Doing automatic updates for Windows is just inviting problems.

 

However, in terms of the Windows Updates process in XP vs. Vista/7, I've found the latter to be more reliable since (unlike with XP) they don't appear and then disappear as a group. (I'm speaking independently of whether the updates themselves mess things up, and independently of the amount of bandwith that downloading them consumes.)

 

Vista SP1, hard as it may seem to say so , is/was a good OS

 

Wow, I never thought I would see these words written by you! 

 

--JorgeA

 

P.S. Happy New Year!!!

[jaclaz]

 

Wow, I never thought I would see these words written by you! 

 

Why not?

I try to be objective as much as I can, the subjective part is that I don't like it, no matter how many SP the good MS guys make on it, there are more than a few things like (as NoelC mentioned before)the UAC madness and the utter stupidity/complexity of the \boot\BCD and BOOTMGR+Winload.exe, including the hardcoding of the \boot\ folder (which were - sadly as expected - ported over to 7 and later and even worsened by the good EFI/UEFI guys) that I simply cannot stand. 

 

But overall there is a seemingly unneeded complexity in these newish OSes that I hate.

 

As another example, try having a booting timing issue with Vista (or later) and generate a trace, you know, like:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/117154-trace-vista-bootshutdownhibernatestandbyresume-issues/

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/140247-trace-windows-7-bootshutdownhibernatestandbyresume-issues/

 

Of course most of the people will rather have a slowish boot than go into that, and - again sadly as expected - the MS guys managed to make that awful experience even worse:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/146919-install-the-windows-performance-tool-kit-wpt/

 

If you use Windows 8.1, you MUST use the WPT from the 8.1 SDK:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/desktop/bg162891

But here the xperfview.exe is missing and you must use the horrible, blurry WPA.exe and I don't update my guide to show how it works with this broken tool, this is too much hassle. Upload the files and I'll try the WPA.exe to read the files.

 

 

jaclaz

[vinifera]

the only good thing that came with Vista was DWM

nothing else, absolutely nothing, and this is core stuff, not UI wise crap, UI was crippled comparing to XP

 

but tech side, UAC how "good" intention it was (but it was lazy made one), is also most annoying one, but ok lets attribute it as step forward, thus A GOOD THING

 

DWM, already mentioned above, GPU acceleration and mapping into GPU memory, stops many graphical bugs and unloads CPU from re-drawing crap

 

other than that Vista has nothing over XP, in fact the dependency via .NET which now increases all the time

just makes it crappier OS

good thing that both Vista and 7 do not require anything more than .net 2.0 to work properly (which is sadly integrated due to MIL and DWM)

 

but winblows 8 and "10" oh my... hello again IE system wide integration and dependency

no thanks, goodbye

Edited January 7, 2015 by vinifera

[sugabeats]

I too think that MS has gone WAY off course.  I think the pinnacle of sucess was XP and 7. 

[JorgeA]

The expected release of the new Windows 10 test build next week may be important in showing the direction MSFT intends to take with it.

 

They could so easily put an end to the biggest chunk of objections to Win10 by offering users the choice to select a Vista/Win7 type of UI (Aero Glass, full Start Menu).

 

Has anybody determined whether UxStyle works properly in build 9879?

 

--JorgeA

[vinifera]

its hilarious how nobody actually realised what made XP so popular in look

---> WINDOW BLINDS <---

 

if stupid MS didn't put that stupid protection onto uxtheme

or just add at least 5 different skins - and by that i don't consider Luna-Silver-Olive to be 3 different

people would b***h alot less, as we always got only 2 skins, and now you only have 1

[NoelC]

But OMG, think of the security nightmare if they allowed people to insert whatever they wanted into the theme subsystem.  It would almost be as though the user owned the system.

 

-Noel

[vinifera]

i meant on graphic files

totally harmless

they could even make such easy basic editor with sample theme

 

point being not to limit people to MS crap, but give us a choice of our liking

Edited January 15, 2015 by vinifera

[bphlpt]

I think that Noel was being sarcastic, taking a page from jaclaz.

 

Cheers and Regards