what went wrong?

>>105659957 (OP)
damn near everything, starting with the company's fundamental business model

Nothing. Vista was objectively the best Windows OS and it's been downhill ever since.

>b-but anon, I'm a brainless cumbrained zoomer gooner and I read on REDDIT that windows Vista was the worst!

It got a bad rap circumstantially. It went like this:

>OEMs made laptops to run windows XP
>windows XP was MUCH less resource intensive than visa
>(oh zoomer you don't understand, windows XP at launch, pre-service packs, could run comfortably on 250MB, yes megabytes, of ram. Yes zoomer, windows XP had a lower memory footprint than a typical webpage does today)
>OEM laptops were designed for WinXP
>Vista drops
>OEMs start installing Vista home on laptops designed for XP
>they barely run
>like they don't fucking work at all
>mass rage "vista sucks I hate vista!"
>OEM hardware catches up
>new OS drops
>it's vista again but with an uglier skin (windows 7)
>everyone loves it

Vista was objectively a nicer, more aesthetic, version of Windows 7. The only difference was 7 came at a time where laptops could support it but vista came when it made the machines run like dirt

Anyway death to zoomers, death to redditers, death to phoneposters and people who were using laptops back then instead of desktops anyway. Long live aero

>>105659997
Don't listen to this shill. Vista had performance issues at launch separate to any under-powered hardware concerns. It only became usable after SP1 dropped.

>>105659957 (OP)
Pentium 4 and 512Mb RAM were just not enough, and to add insult MS didn't let intel make a certified GMA900 driver so no aero compatibility on a few month old machines when it was released

>>105660099
Basically XP was the last good Windows.

>>105660134
Basically you're too young to remember how people said the same thing about XP and preferred Win2k.

>>105660250
XP before SP2 sucked. I did prefer 2K. But the gap between XP and Vista was way bigger than 2K to XP.

>>105660017
this. i remember trying out vista pre sp-1 and it ran like shit. It also did some very aggresive indexing so the harddrive was running at near full speed constantly. On top of this you had poor/bad driver support because of a new driver framework introduced with vista which caused all oems to release buggy drivers.
I never experienced any problem after SP1/2 though and i used it as my main driver until 2017 when microsoft dropped support

>>105660304
Except back then most people were upgrading from 9x to XP, which is an even bigger difference.

>>105659957 (OP)
Laptop makers

>>105659957 (OP)
aero was pretty awesome. Only poor fags with shitty gfxs would cry all day long

>>105660250
As someone who hated XP back in the old times you are not wrong, but its also not the same. XP fucked things up, but you can mostly fix them with various tweaks, and the increased bloat can eventually be overcome by newer hardware.

Vista on the other hand fucked things up so fundamentally and in completely unfixable ways. Also, no amount of hardware upgrades can make Vista function as well as XP did.

im still so pissed that someone at microsoft told their UI designers to "just change things a bit for windows 7"
the vista aero style was incredibly good in so many standpoints, including being a good bit more usable than the kinda overly glassy and less textured 7

>>105659957 (OP)
- a few disastrous day zero bugs, like file copying being broken (well, it worked, but sometimes dropped to 10kb/s even on sequential transfers)
- paradigm change in how app security is handled resulting in all existing applications throwing you UAC prompts. this was a good thing, but end users only saw it as an annoyance because every app to this point was made with the assumptions that you are running as admin.

but the worst part was that

- hardware vendors released broken or no drivers, even for hardware that could run the OS fine (I've seen dozens of nForce3 setups where absolute high end systems got stuck at XP), or worse, new hardware that was meant to take advantage of Vista (nvidia 8800, a DX10 card, didn't get Vista drivers until later).
- OEMs plastered the "Vista Ready" sticker on low-end shitboxes that could, at most, barely boot Vista and run it in the most basic mode.

Three years later, we had enough hardware with compatible drivers, and app devs updated everything to run in user space, so Win7 had no such problems at launch. But I guarantee you, if Win7 had launched in 2006 into the same environment as Vista, it would've been just as disastrous.

>>105659957 (OP)
Not enough space to incorporate AI slop.

>>105660250
>Basically you're too young to remember how people said the same thing about XP and preferred Win2k.
Win2k was awesome, it used something like 16MB RAM for the OS, it was insane.

The only problem was once USB 2.0 became a thing, 2k became largely obsolete due to lack of drivers.

>>105660510
>Except back then most people were upgrading from 9x to XP, which is an even bigger difference.

98SE support had to be extended several years due to so many people still using it. I remember I only switched to XP around early 2003 (only to get hit by the Blaster along with everyone else).

>>105659957 (OP)
Nvidia and shitty OEM's

>>105661203
SP4 had USB 2.0 drivers.
I tried to use it on a Pentium 1 with 64MB RAM and it was unusable.

>>105659957 (OP)
incredibly unoptimized for its time

TLDR is at the time it was a substantial system requirement increase and people had gotten used to being able to use some destitute tier hardware to do whatever they needed
When vista came out it was not uncommon to see some businesses still using windows 98 SE, and for home users to be on 2000. There were Pentium III’s still in everyday use.
Vista comes around and you wanted some kind of dual core and at least 2gb of ram for the full experience and even that was kinda slow compared to what it could do.
Pair that with the shaky launch and bugs with the OS early on and people disliked it immediately. They saw it as over complication of the windows operating system, not an increase in features.

>>105660877
>no amount of hardware upgrades can make Vista function as well as XP did.

Wrong. SSD. Even early 2000s SSDs like the X25-M made gigantic difference. Add in a decent GPU that can run Aero stable, and at least 1GB RAM, and Vista will run perfect. Assuming you are using hardware that all has proper Vista drivers; a lot of boards simply didn't.
This was basically my 2009 setup:
- GA-P35-DS3
- E6550
- 2GB RAM
- Intel X-25M 40GB
- Radeon HD3650
Vista ran buttery smooth with this setup.

>>105661250
P1 maxed out at something like 133MHz and didn't even have MMX, 2k SP4 came out when you had 1GHz Thunderbird Athlon XPs and Coppermine Pentium 3s.

Lack of USB2 drivers was something that a lot of 2K holdouts I knew suffered, hell we even had issues installing them on WinXP.

>>105661258
>Vista comes around and you wanted some kind of dual core and at least 2gb of ram for the full experience and even that was kinda slow compared to what it could do.

The budget dual core systems at the time didn't get Vista chipset drivers so they only ran with hacks at best, or not at all at worst.

Once everyone started upgrading to Core 2s this became less of a problem.

>>105661314
>Lack of USB2 drivers was something that a lot of 2K holdouts I knew suffered, hell we even had issues installing them on WinXP.
Maybe you just didn't knew what you were doing
>>105661279
1GB RAM is a bit small, you really wanted at least 2GB for vista

>>105661279
Vista adds several frames of input lag to the UI. No amount of hardware will make this lag go away.

>>105661338
>Maybe you just didn't knew what you were doing
At our school if we installed XP and then SP2 on top, it didn't get USB 2.0 drivers. We had to use an installer that had SP2 slipstreamed, the machines installed that way did get USB 2.0.

>>105661391
>Vista adds several frames of input lag to the UI.
You know you can customize the UI animations, right? Remove all the animations and basically only keep on shadows and "show window content when moving", and it'll be super fast with no lag whatsoever.

>>105659957 (OP)
No one could decided to pronounce it "veese-ta" or "viss-tuh" so they kept using XP instead

>>105661434
>No one could decided to pronounce it "veese-ta" or "viss-tuh"

The only people who had that problem were the retards who liked Jar Jar Binks.

>>105661441
A lot of people liked Jar Jar Binks in the 00's

>>105661471
Of all the revisionist garbage I've read on 4chan, this one has to be the stupidest so far.

Nobody liked Jar Jar.

It killed my PC's GPU, now it made a come back to kills my phone's GPU, very funny.

>>105661421
I am not talking about animations, the compositor adds lag.