April 11th - Microsoft Ends Windows Vista Support
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PrMinisterGR
Probably the most important Windows release, tech wise, since NT.
mtrai
Seriously MS needs to move to less lengthy support to the benefit of all. Just my opinion.
Yeah Longhorn/Vista was actually good...a bit ahead of its time.
Extraordinary
20 years?
RTM 2006 🙂 / GA 2007
schmidtbag
To my understanding, the support is more in terms of security patches; that's about it. I figure most of those patches are trickled down from newer OSes. MS likely predicted demand for Vista was going to last longer than it did, in the same way that happened with XP. They have the money to keep up with it, so I wouldn't say it's really hurting anybody. Think about it - there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to use Vista over either XP or Windows 7 (depending what your objective and hardware is). These are not people who have any influence on the PC market.
As for Vista being "actually good", no, it wasn't. As PrMinisterGR put it, Vista was a very important release, but it was never a good OS. It was an adequate and very usable OS by the time Windows 7 was released, at which point you might as well have bought 7 if you didn't already own Vista.
SorienOR
I still have 6 Vista systems, running it since release day. I really like it over the newer versions.
Truder
Yup, we're still using essentially the same NT kernel today, with Vista came NT 6.0, Win7 6.1, Win8, 6.2, Win8.1 6.3 and Win10 6.4, although Microsoft have arbitrarily changed the NT version number for Win10 to..... NT 10.0
With Vista, the whole OS eco-system changed, the major overhaul of the NT kernel, the driver platform, the rendering engine for the GUI etc
Of course, over time over the various subsequent releases of Windows, things have been improved but the fact is, everything has been built on top of Windows Vista.
And many would agree, Windows 7, was Windows Vista done right.
Yxskaft
I always thought that Microsoft should have had the free Windows 10 upgrade cover Vista as well.
The userbase is minimal compared to Windows 7, yet the Vista userbase would have had a bigger incentive to upgrade, knowing supports for Vista was coming to an end.
mtrai
Note I added Longhorn to what I said...If Vista had retained all the features it had during the long beta we paid 10 USD a pop for the beta Disc it would of been so much better...however like my favorite MMO EQ2 should of been great however it was also ahead of its time...and simply all of us, even tech nerds then did not have supercomputers to handle either of their visions.
tsunami231
meh i really need to installed win7 or win10 on that laptop that still uses it.
alanm
Terrible hardware support in its early weeks, massive memory hogging/cacheing and the first appearance of UAC. Dual booting XP was necessary for me. Took me about 6 months before using Vista predominantly over XP.
intellimoo
lmao too. Maybe it felt like 20 waiting from xp to vista. And then the major letdown... ha
Anarion
****. I misread. Aye, and it came out too early even though it was delayed numerous times.
schmidtbag
Unless you had a CPU with HT, why exactly didn't you just stick with XP and then upgrade to 7 when that came out? There were easily accessible patches to run DX10 games in XP. I'm not aware of anything else at the time that was better about Vista that couldn't be accounted for.
Slammy
I used Vista Ultimate for quite awhile and liked it. I don't remember having any major issues with it. I loved the Windows Vista "orb" live wall paper and the side bar gadgets were cool.
People compare it to Me and that was a true disaster!
Kaarme
I never had Vista on my own PCs. I've a friend who's still running a Vista machine, but I reckon she's getting a new PC this summer.
mtrai
Y'all know we all just gave away really how old we are.
moab600
Awful windows, until after SP1 and two performance patches, vista became GREAT, but was irrelevant as windows 7 was around, and the hate towards vista was too strong.
schmidtbag
It can be safely assumed most of us are in our 20s or later. That's a pretty large age group.
The next most distinct age group would be discussing Windows 2000 (or ME), as those were the next most popular Windows OSes that people actually migrated from once something better came around. XP retained it's popularity for long enough that many teens would know what it is.
Fox2232
And worst one ever at same time.
It was step forward in terms of software technologies. But edition wise Vista was crappiest release of OS. Every edition had very different control panel, lower editions had crucial features missing.
Lowest edition (can't remember name) did not even have access to NTFS permission settings. I had to hack in libraries from higher edition to fix cousin's HDD after she reinstalled OS.
Before Vista and after Vista I could navigate almost anyone via phone to solution, but navigating people to anything in Vista...
And then there was performance. Some things were better than XP, some were worse. But second beta of Win 7 came... I 1st tested 32bit version and it was miles better on system with 4GB of ram. Then friend with exactly same HW tested 64bit version and we found that it is even better.
Windows 7 left Vista in dust in every aspect. And I never saw single reason to stay on Vista instead of moving to W7.
Lol, I was using W 3.1 on PC. And installed it 3 times...
[spoiler]But my 1st OS was "Basic v3.5" and 2nd was "Basic v2.0". And I used plotbasic, supergraphics, Simon's assembler, ...[/spoiler]
rl66
if i remember right longhorn fork in 2: the future 7 in dev and vista in a hurry because the new iPear's OS make the old (but good) XP look so vintage.
and that's was the problem.
