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What was so bad about Windows ME and Vista?
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[Deleted User]
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Everyone slates these versions, myself personally I ran Windows ME and had no problems, never upgraded to 2000 and XP was out a year or 2 before I upgraded to that. Windows Vista again had no problems with and actually prefer it over 7.
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There were a few quirks in the early days, but they were soon ironed out.
I think a lot of people just jump on the bandwagon & slag off Vista just because it's fashionable.
All these were fixed by SP2, but people seem to forget that the RTM version had many basics not working correctly.
Add to this the OS became a bloated pig compared to XP and its system requirement to run smoothly was a lot greater, yet manufactures were shipping it on devices with only 512MB RAM where is it needs more like 2GB to run very smoothly. This fixed it self when the manufactures started shipping with decent amount of RAM for the OS, so when it was Windows 7's turn the RAM thing was a non issue. Windows 7 base is actually Vista SP2 code.
Vista was fine as long as you had the fast hardware to run it and all the peripherals you had had decent drivers. Windows 7 was what Vista should have been.
Vista, was too much for the hardware of the day and there was some annoying things about it, like being asked to agree to almost everything it did. While I can understand why it was done, it was over the top. Defender was also a pain, even when it is supposed to be switched off, it still was annoying.
windows 7 so much better.
My nextdoor neighbours computer is still running vista, must get that changed to 7 at some point.
I guess you mean User Access Control. It's easy to turn off, but in some circumstances best left enabled. I gave a neighbour an old Windows 7 pc of mine that had UAC off. He was back with it, riddled with malware, about once a month. The last time I turned UAC back on and he's had hardly any problems since. He's one of those people who clicks yes to everything (in a hurry to get to a pr0n video etc) not realising he's installing iLivid, Open Candy and the rest.
It was much improved after the first service pack and after the second service pack, it was on a par with Win 7 [which is basically Vista SP3 anyway].
It was rushed to market too soon before the peripheral equipment driver compatibility issues had been fully sorted out and before PC specifications had caught up with Vista's requirements. Had it been launched 9 months to a year later than it was, then Vista might have been remembered more fondly.
As for Vista - simply a case of both the OS & the available hardware not being ready at the point of release. Vista was a slug and even with later Service Packs, it's still slower than Windows XP, 7 & 8. If your PC will run Vista, chances are it will probably run better with 7 (or 8 if your specs support it).
Vista was a bloated pig of an operating system. It required too much RAM and too much hard drive space and didn't really offer any improvements over XP at the time. Most manufacturers in 2006/early 2007 didn't sell computers with the right specs for Vista and that probably led to it getting a bad reputation. The UAC was also a pain in the backside. "You moved your mouse, cancel or allow?" Argh! >:( I bet most users hated being faced with the Spanish Inquisition everytime they tried to do anything with their computer. Vista was banned in our house because dad thought it was crap and it was not worth upgrading (and our computers in early '07 weren't really capable of running it).
It might be better after a couple of service packs and hardware that was released years after the OS, but on the hardware of the day it was a dog. Perhaps a lot of its criticism came from that.
I had a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, which IIRC was well in excess of the system requirements. You could expect it to thrash the hard drives for 10 minutes on boot up and then do it again if you tried to use the computer. It acted as if it was constantly swapping. Didn't take long to go back to XP.
Windows 7 on the same machine absolutely flew.
Then there was the whole "Vista Capable" debacle where machines with cheap, slow processors and very little RAM were sold with Vista or the promise of a free upgrade later on - and they performed even worse
Windows 7/8/10 aren't bad at all on older machines, I've found
ME wasn't bad it just was an win98se update where they just chucked a few junior programmers to try and deal with it while the pro's were doing win2k and with the right gear it wasn't too bad but it was obviously end of line so the management wasn't into sorting it out too much and win2k had directx so could play quite a lot of games and XP sorted out the sore points of that for most domestic customers
Vista was a PR nightmare...you were allowed to put a vista capable sticker pretty much on anything even a pork pie and it's allowed and its minimum spec was hilarious as they tried to grab as much market share as possible
That is the one, sorry, I could not think of the name.
I can understand the reasons for it, but it was not very well thought out to be honest, windows 7 does a much better job.
Saying that one persons computer I sorted out that had problems with malware, I stuck on mint Linux, told them to like it or lump it, because I was fed up of sorting out their machine. I do not have the concentration at the moment to muck around with my own computer never mind others.
Thankfully it worked out fine, according to the user of the computer, once he have got used to it, it have been the best he have ever known it. Fast, stable, no malware and does what the family want it to do.
Of cause if they wanted Windows back on it I would put it back, this was a windows XP machine by the way.
It was ahead of the hardware that was the main problem and lack of drivers. but syaing that not always.
The PC world machine my next door neighbours have got is not too bad on power, a quad core 2Ghz AMD machine, 4GB of ram and should in theory be pretty fast, but with Vista it seems to like treacle. I ran mint on it from a USB memory stick and it was a lot faster, even coming off a USB.
I know the machine is not top end, it was not when it was new and it is about 5 years old, maybe older, but it should still should still work faster than it does.
I will once I feel more like it strip the machine down as I feel the CPU needs a clean and I have got them to agree to pay for a OEM version of windows 7 to stick on it, best bet I think.
This is subjective, but I think that Vista, irrespective of any issues, was also the most aesthetically pleasing of all of Microsoft's operating systems.
Really, My first thought about any OS is will it do what I want it to do in a speedy and secure way as possible and is the UI ok to use?
What it looks like is a fair way down the scale for me. when i first started on XP, for months I made it look like windows 98 using the classic theme.
I use Mint a lot with the cinnamon desktop UI and that is not really great looking, but it is practical and works well.
Maybe that is the problem, people want things to look sparkly with loads of animations then they wonder why the hardware can not cope.
And you try and make W8 look like W7....bit of a trend showing lol ;-)
Seems like MS also wants to make W8 look like windows 7 as well, is that not why they are putting the start menu back?
Windows ME seemed to be an attempt to wean users off DOS and make the OS seems more unified with the NT stream with plug and play on Windows 2000 and System Restore. It was of course not less stable as on OS than 98 but it would let programs replace DLLs and then rewrite them with the original windows ones when they had finished installing. If you wanted to still play DOS games I think you needed to make a boot disk from inside the operating system.
Have a look at Microsoft's Engineering 7 blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/
Same with me. I ditched Vista after a few years of having it. I find it slow. I don't know if its the older version since it was pre-installed when I had my first laptop. I have Windows 7 now.