Share your Microsoft Windows Vista Experience!

[Win10-Hater]

Hello all, this topic has been created by me for fellow MSFN users to post their Vista computer's specs and share their experience of using Windows Vista.

My specs:

Dell Latitude e5420 Laptop
Intel Core i5-2520m
8 GB DDR3-1333 MHz RAM
480 GB Kingston A400 SSD
Windows Vista Ultimate SP2 x64 build 6003

My experience with Vista: I started using Vista only about 6 months ago and before that, I knew nothing about Vista, but I immediately fell in love with it. Now I use Vista on 2 of my computers, one being the Latitude and another desktop with:

Intel D945GCPE mobo
Intel Pentium D 915
3 GB DDR2-800 MHz RAM
Windows Vista Business SP2 x64 build 6003
160GB Seagate HDD . It ran Windows 7 and 10 slooooowly, so I put Vista on it and it runs superfast! XP was not an option since there is no extended kernel, which is there for Vista.

 

Edited March 19, 2021 by Win10-Hater
Updates

[Jaguarek62]

I use Vista on my Dell latitude e6330 with these specs:

Intel Core I5-3340M

8gb ram

480gb ssd from corsair

Intel hd graphics

I use vista just because of nostalgia. I used it as my main os since 2008-2013. Before I start with my complaints I really need to clarify, that I love Vista so much, but there are things that are just straight up bad.

Vista’s disk trashing is first and the most annoying thing on the planet. Vista seems to access the disk and make unnecessary i/o operations. I have no idea what is it doing (Windows Update is turned off as well system protection, background programs). Next annoying thing is delay after boot up. After welcome screen, I have to wait another 30-40 seconds on ssd mind you, just so I can open web browser. In that 30-40 second time window, Disk is not being accessed nor any program is doing anything. I have installed vista countless times and this is an issue. And finally fps in direct x 9/11. Windows 7/8.1 are always better in gaming by around 10%. Yeah that is probably lack of optimization for Vista, but still it is an issue.  Ram usage on vista is higher on clean install than on 8.1. I’m surprised that windows 7/8.1 were slower on your pc. Almost every computer I’ve tried was just as fast or faster in some instances on newer os. Like I said in the beginning, I love Vista, I will still use it and enjoy it, but it can be better.

Edited November 13, 2020 by Jaguarek62

[Win10-Hater]

20 hours ago, Jaguarek62 said:

I use Vista on my Dell latitude e6330 with these specs:

Intel Core I5-3340M

8gb ram

480gb ssd from corsair

Intel hd graphics

I use vista just because of nostalgia. I used it as my main os since 2008-2013. Before I start with my complaints I really need to clarify, that I love Vista so much, but there are things that are just straight up bad.

Vista’s disk trashing is first and the most annoying thing on the planet. Vista seems to access the disk and make unnecessary i/o operations. I have no idea what is it doing (Windows Update is turned off as well system protection, background programs). Next annoying thing is delay after boot up. After welcome screen, I have to wait another 30-40 seconds on ssd mind you, just so I can open web browser. In that 30-40 second time window, Disk is not being accessed nor any program is doing anything. I have installed vista countless times and this is an issue. And finally fps in direct x 9/11. Windows 7/8.1 are always better in gaming by around 10%. Yeah that is probably lack of optimization for Vista, but still it is an issue.  Ram usage on vista is higher on clean install than on 8.1. I’m surprised that windows 7/8.1 were slower on your pc. Almost every computer I’ve tried was just as fast or faster in some instances on newer os. Like I said in the beginning, I love Vista, I will still use it and enjoy it, but it can be better.

Yes, even I have experienced a little delay even on SSD, but I found Win7, 8.1 and 10 to be slower for mysterious reasons. Maybe the SSD is a little bit of a bottleneck as my A400 SSD has no DRAM cache. So I think a Samsung EVO SSD or Crucial MX500 SSD should further improve the performance and speed up boot time.

Edited November 14, 2020 by TECHGEEK

[yoltboy01]

My specs:

 

Intel i5 8250U

8GB RAM

250GB SSD

Windows Vista Home Premium x64 (German)

 

I started using Vista in 2008, after our XP PC refused to start. Back then, I did not know that it was a driver error which led to the crash and not a hardware error (Nowadays I am the PC specialist in our family lol), so we bought a new PC. I cant remeber the processor but I know it had 2GB RAM and ran Business x32. Vista was very nice, we used it till 2013, before we upgraded to Windows 7. I remember that Vista did not support IE10/11 and Office 2013, which were the two major problems with it. We didnt use Windows 7 for a long time (I think only till 2014). In 2015 we upgraded to Windows 8.1, which was very fast in comparison to any other OS I had used before. When Windows 10 came out, our PC couldnt handle, so we made a fresh Clean Install of 8.1 and even nowadays it still runs veryy fine (we upgraded the RAM to 4GB)

[Win10-Hater]

2 hours ago, yoltboy01 said:

My specs:

 

Intel i5 8250U

8GB RAM

250GB SSD

Windows Vista Home Premium x64 (German)

i5-8250u? Am I correct in assuming that you run Vista on a VM? 

Edited November 14, 2020 by TECHGEEK

[Win10-Hater]

2 hours ago, yoltboy01 said:

My specs:

 

Intel i5 8250U

8GB RAM

250GB SSD

Windows Vista Home Premium x64 (German)

 

I started using Vista in 2008, after our XP PC refused to start. Back then, I did not know that it was a driver error which led to the crash and not a hardware error (Nowadays I am the PC specialist in our family lol), so we bought a new PC. I cant remeber the processor but I know it had 2GB RAM and ran Business x32. Vista was very nice, we used it till 2013, before we upgraded to Windows 7. I remember that Vista did not support IE10/11 and Office 2013, which were the two major problems with it. We didnt use Windows 7 for a long time (I think only till 2014). In 2015 we upgraded to Windows 8.1, which was very fast in comparison to any other OS I had used before. When Windows 10 came out, our PC couldnt handle, so we made a fresh Clean Install of 8.1 and even nowadays it still runs veryy fine (we upgraded the RAM to 4GB)

Also could you please specify your laptop model number?

[burd]

My Specs are:

Intel i7 6700HQ

12GB RAM

Toshiba 128GB SSD M.2

Samsung EVO 1TB SSD 

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060

Windows Vista Business SP2 x64

 

Laptop Model : MSI GT72VR 6RD Dominator Pro 

 

Edited November 14, 2020 by burd

[win32]

Mostly using this config:

-Intel Xeon X5670 2.93 GHz 6C/12T

-12 GB DDR3-1333

-NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 (which is like a GTX 260; I think Santa will bring something that brings me into the DX11 age )

-1 TB 7200 rpm HDD (a WD Purple IIRC)

-500 GB 5400 rpm Seagate HDD

I remember when Vista came out and always wanted to use it, but only got to use it 12 years after release. And now look at me.

Since I first heard about kernel extensions, I always wanted to make some, though my attempts were always unsuccessful. At one point towards the end of 2019, I was experimenting with changing new win7+ functions to older ones present on Vista, specifically for Waterfox Classic. I got the UI to load but it would crash immediately.

Then I learned more and more about the process and decided to choose an OS where a kernel extension effort would:

-not overlap with existing ones

-be plausible

-and also be workable on my bare metal

So I chose Windows Vista!

Vista takes about 40 seconds to boot for me, compared to about 25 seconds for XP x64 and 7 x64 on my main workstation with a 7200 rpm HDD. While the boot process is quite uniform for me on XP and 7, the sequence can be quite erratic on Vista, with the periods of ntoskrnl-stored startup screen and blank screen with cursor (pre-orb animation) seemingly varying in length per boot (sometimes my monitor gives me a no signal message post startup-screen; other times it doesn't). Perhaps fragmentation is a factor (I have Vista follow the standard weekly defrag schedule), but I also see a possibility that this occurrence of boot time variance to whatever is responsible for causing usermode (don't believe I have seen kernelmode components fail to load) library/executable load failure on Haswell and up. This in itself is a major Achilles heel of the operating system and needs to be resolved somehow if I were to successfully create kernelmode extensions that allow hardware typically accompanying recent CPUs to fully function.

X58 is period correct for Vista and my machine does work very well with it.

On 11/13/2020 at 8:25 AM, Jaguarek62 said:

Vista’s disk trashing is first and the most annoying thing on the planet. Vista seems to access the disk and make unnecessary i/o operations.

Just wondering; do you have indexing and SuperFetch enabled? That's responsible for most of it, and both should definitely be disabled on an SSD. I had noticed that my disk I/O indicator light was on constantly for awhile; Process Hacker said it was a low-priority read operation by a system process on a Vista ISO I had recently used in a VM. After disabling SuperFetch, that stopped. It's not going to be of much use if it's going to be for something used so rarely. The SuperFetch algorithm must have prioritized it so highly because of its size and recent usage.

Edited November 14, 2020 by win32

[Dixel]

8 hours ago, win32 said:

Vista takes about 40 seconds to boot for me....

There's something wrong , it shouldn't be that long . On my system it's like 11-16 seconds.

I have Xeon X5440 and DDR3 16GB , HDD WD Raptor 500GB

SuperFetch and indexing disabled , of course .

Wanted to ask , in my event viewer I'm being bombarded with Terminal service

messages because I removed remoting from ISO. How to stop it ?

"Registering with ... The specified service does not exist as an installed service , retry in ten minute" 

Yes "minute" , not "minutes" . Seems like non native speakers working at MS...

Edit: Perhaps your uptime is too long because of the updates ?

Updates are evil , I have an absolutely clean SP2 , told ya.

Oh , and SP1 loads even faster , like 6-7 seconds on my second PC.

Windows 7 (without updates) loads much longer , don't remember the exact number,

but much , much slower than Vista .

Edited November 14, 2020 by Dixel

[Jaguarek62]

35 minutes ago, Dixel said:

There's something wrong , it shouldn't be that long . On my system it's like 11-16 seconds.

My vista boots in like 20 seconds with extended kernel and all updates. Windows 7 takes about 25 seconds. Windows 8.1 with fast boot enabled around 6-8 seconds.

Edited November 14, 2020 by Jaguarek62

[Dixel]

I had started using Vista in 2007, right at the very beginning, when it became available at stores. I bought a new PC, made by Siemens in Germany , with preinstalled Vista x86. Processor Core Quad q6600 , 4GB DDR2 RAM and it ran Vista so blazingly fast , of course I had supefetch disabled. Vista seemed nice overall, but the white background drove me nuts , my eyebals coudn't stand it and I went back to Windows 2000 for some time , then I returned (when dark themes became available). I never upgraded to any newer Windows and not going to. I tried Windows 7 , Windows 8 , they were slow and ugly (I'm sorry if someone don't like this, but that's my opinion) , besides all later Windows have terrible sound quality ! They look and sound cheap (again, to my own tastes as a customer).

 

[Jaguarek62]

3 minutes ago, Dixel said:

with preinstalled Vista x86. Processor Core Quad q6600 , 4GB DDR2 RAM

32bit vista with 4gb of ram? why?

[Dixel]

3 hours ago, Jaguarek62 said:

My vista boots in like 20 seconds with extended kernel and all updates. Windows 7 takes about 25 seconds. Windows 8.1 with fast boot enabled around 6-8 seconds.

It's because you don't use Nvidia . Their drivers will add some time to the boot , at least on my second PC with GTX980.

Without Nvidia it's like 5-6 seconds , with , 6-7 sec.

[Dixel]

3 hours ago, Jaguarek62 said:

32bit vista with 4gb of ram? why?

What do you mean ? 32bit Vista can use all 4GB . I had 3.86 available for the system (some was reserved by the MOBO)

[Jaguarek62]

Just now, Dixel said:

What do you mean ? 32bit Vista can use all 4GB . I had 3.86 available for the system (some was reserved by the MOBO)

I thought you can only address 3.5gb of ram on 32bit oses?