Steve Ballmer: Longhorn-Vista was the "single biggest mistake I made

anticupidon

2013-12-12 19:00

Yeah the 64bit version wasn't too bad but most systems (nearly all OEM) had Vista 32. And it was a DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOG.

Add to that mix old hardware and piss poor drivers support and you can have half office staff commiting suicide. Anyone fixed a sharing printer between Xp and Vista problem?You will understand Yeah,anything above x32 HomePremium was better. Had x64 Vista Bussines Edition and it was good,until upgraded to W 7

#4723178

Fender178

2013-12-12 19:13

GFWL is a bigger mistake.

You got that right man. I bought the 2 Batman Games (Arkham Aslyum and City) for PC on steam and turns out to huge mistake on my part because the games refuse to save my progress.

#4723328

S_IV

2013-12-12 22:32

wow, I still use Vista. And you have a lot of choices within Vista. You can enable/disable welcome window, turn on/off sidebar and UAC, use aero with or without tranparency or classic theme, you can use classic start menu or the new one and so on. It was really "Windows reimagined" after XP with calendar, gadgets, defender, sidebar, 64-bit, a new theme, new icons, superfetch, readyboost etc. I think gfwl is the biggest mistake undoubtedly and win. 8.1 start button is teh second. oh man that button or "thing" is really fake. even if you change the place of the taskbar it's still there :S

#4723503

fr33k

2013-12-13 05:41

I used vista/longhorn for a long time and it wasn't that bad. maybe in 5 years he will admit metro was his worst. Well in the case of PC's.

#4723511

(.)(.)

2013-12-13 06:34

I used vista/longhorn for a long time and it wasn't that bad. maybe in 5 years he will admit metro was his worst. Well in the case of PC's.

Yeah, and now there's talk at MS HQ of getting rid of the Metro UI for their phones; the one system/device that metro was actually good on/usable.

#4723528

AlexKidd5000

2013-12-13 07:22

Vista? really? I was very misinformed about Vista back when it was new, I never gave it a chance, but from what I have heard, Vista wasn't actually that bad, obviously it needed some patch work, but what OS dosen't?

#4723533

Pill Monster

2013-12-13 07:39

Vista? really? I was very misinformed about Vista back when it was new, I never gave it a chance, but from what I have heard, Vista wasn't actually that bad, obviously it needed some patch work, but what OS dosen't?

Windows 7.

#4723609

John

2013-12-13 12:00

I used Vista x64 since launch and never had any real issues with it. Sure, I had powerful hardware for the time, and I also spent an entire weekend tweaking it, removing bloat and crap I didn't need. But once it was up and running, it never really gave me any issues at all. Performance was good, too. Not to say Win7 isn't better in every possible way. Win7 is excellent, though.

#4723633

Veteran

2013-12-13 12:39

I used Vista x64 since launch and never had any real issues with it. Sure, I had powerful hardware for the time, and I also spent an entire weekend tweaking it, removing bloat and crap I didn't need. But once it was up and running, it never really gave me any issues at all. Performance was good, too. Not to say Win7 isn't better in every possible way. Win7 is excellent, though.

Same, even though i had Vista i tweaked it and it ran fine, better than XP tbh.

#4723643

Extraordinary

2013-12-13 12:52

Yeah, and now there's talk at MS HQ of getting rid of the Metro UI for their phones; the one system/device that metro was actually good on/usable.

That rumour was started by someone not very credible (Eldar Murtazin) according to WPCentral, basically BS they were saying http://www.wpcentral.com/stopping-rumor-mill-windows-phone-unique-ui

#4723681

(.)(.)

2013-12-13 14:37

^^Gotcha, thanks for clearing that up.

#4724274

WaroDaBeast

2013-12-14 15:34

You guys seem to be forgetting that OEM vendors insisted on getting those "Vista capable" stickers for their machines, even when said machines could barely run Windows Vista. When you take into account the fact that Vista had higher hardware requirements than XP, you get a very nice "unhappy user" recipe. I have used Vista a bunch of times, and I have to say I got a weird bug at times: files that wouldn't copy. But then, XP was buggy at release, too. But XP's release was a long time ago, so either people have forgotten or they didn't use XP until its first or second service pack. I think Vista got the hate mainly because it ran poorly (and, like I said ealier, that's partially due to OEM's) and because UAC prompts would occur way too often.

#4724279

sykozis

2013-12-14 15:40

You guys seem to be forgetting that OEM vendors insisted on getting those "Vista capable" stickers for their machines, even when said machines could barely run Windows Vista. When you take into account the fact that Vista had higher hardware requirements than XP, you get a very nice "unhappy user" recipe. I have used Vista a bunch of times, and I have to say I got a weird bug at times: files that wouldn't copy. But then, XP was buggy at release, too. But XP's release was a long time ago, so either people have forgotten or they didn't use XP until its first or second service pack. I think Vista got the hate mainly because it ran poorly (and, like I said ealier, that's partially due to OEM's) and because UAC prompts would occur way too often.

XP was just as bad at launch, as it was in beta..... The only real difference was 3rd party support from hardware and software vendors.

#4725527

Pvfc-Epic

2013-12-16 16:01

the only extra thing i have to do with win 8.1 is login to the metro to access the desktop even my wife who was really anti win 8 now thinks its really no different to win 7 vista wasnt bad if like many say u had good hardware. XP had an annoying problem of using 100% cpu and causing audio pops/crackles on certain machines

#4725560

sykozis

2013-12-16 16:58

I've recently discovered my first true gripe about Windows8.x.... Skydrive integration. I've got a lot of files stored on Skydrive that are no longer accessible because MS requires the use of a Microsoft account to access Skydrive on Win8.1. If you've setup Windows to use a local account instead of a Microsoft account, you can't use Skydrive. I'm now in the process of migrating all the files I have stored on Skydrive to Google Drive because of this. I'd say Skydrive integration with Windows8.1 is a bigger mistake than Vista was.....