• Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    The crazy thing was Vista was great with good hardware. The huge problem it had was strong security. Everything was locked down and required admin elevation to change.

    You know how Linux requires su for every system change and everyone thinks that’s fine? That was Vista but it enraged techies to click an ok box for su.

    • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Iirc, tasks requiring elevated permissions wasn’t the main complaint, maybe just one of the most vocal ones.

      Even with good hardware, it was not optimized for performance in general. This was amplified by the fact they also marketed Vista as having a wide range of older hardware support, which resulted in many users upgrading from XP only to have their performance absolutely tank. I think there was even a lawsuit because of how they marketed some devices as, “Vista ready.”

      Regardless, Vista was still better than Windows 8.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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      9 days ago

      Can confirm 100%.

      During Vista’s heyday, I worked in a PC repair shop. All the ones that came in because “Vista sucks” were all Walmart specials with the bare minimum 512 MB RAM and crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel Seagate HDDs.

      The thing would start thrashing as soon it booted with the default assortment of bloatware. By the time they brought it in, the HDD was in rough shape which made the thrashing even worse.

      Fix was always to upgrade the RAM and, most often, replace the dying Seagate drive with a good one. Removing the bloatware helped as well once the root problems were addressed.

      The UAC stuff was also annoying, but those could be tuned.

      • Benjaben@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Yep, I did similar around the time. Can’t blame people for being mad that the thing they bought is damn near unusable (and was destined to be, but they didn’t understand that part). If someone buys a new bike, even if it’s cheap, it shouldn’t roll like you’re on gravel after a couple weeks and become impossible to pedal within months. But damn, there were a lot of horrible machines sold in those days.

        And then of course, the least fun part of that era, the guys who would bring their machines back weekly despite very stern warnings to stop visiting “those sites”.

        • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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          9 days ago

          And then of course, the least fun part of that era, the guys who would bring their machines back weekly despite very stern warnings to stop visiting “those sites”.

          Hey, they were good for business lol

          Lady he's putting my kids through college

          • Benjaben@lemmy.world
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            9 days ago

            Definitely not wrong! Especially once you’ve dialed in your routine of anti-malware utilities to run on pretty much everything. It’s like an antibiotic cocktail, lol. Or did you prefer the “back up and nuke on sight” approach?

            • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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              9 days ago

              I’d usually start with my suite of cleanup tools, do some manual cleanup if needed, apply all the software and security updates, and then give it a day with some light test usage. Then I’d re-run the tools to see if they picked anything back up. If not, I released it back to the customer. If anything at all came back, I’d backup their data, pull all the product keys I could (Office, Photoshop, etc), nuke the OS, and reinstall what I could as close to the original as possible.

    • lime!@feddit.nu
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      9 days ago

      this! i got my first vista experience on a laptop with a Turion and 2GB of RAM and it was really smooth. bit too chunky for my taste ux-wise but it was solid. first bluescreen i got on that machine was after installing W7.

      then the GPU melted its own solder after a few years and that machine was relegated to server duty.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        9 days ago

        I think it enraged everyone, but when you’re already using a more secure system (Linux), the whiplash isn’t so surprising. Speaking as a non-Windows user, so just my outside observation.

        • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          The main issue was that Vista asked for admin rights all the time. One of the first things they addressed with SP1 was to require admin privileges for fewer operations, cutting down on the number of UAC prompts.

    • twinnie@feddit.uk
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      9 days ago

      I remember defending it online against a bunch of Linux users and I got told that the UAC prompt is overbearing while having to type your password is fine because it’s just “muscle memory”.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 days ago

      I’ve been using Windows 11 for some time. Besides it’s terrible AI features being shoved down our throats, what’s different about it from Win10?

      I don’t see too much of a difference between the two versions. The AI enshittification is relatively recent.

      • Baggie@lemmy.zip
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        9 days ago

        That’s pretty much the main thing, through they keep trying to slip shit it like the recall function, ads in new places. They also had some real trouble with the new internal CPU management, not sure where that is these days.

        Honestly I’m tired of Microsoft pulling this shit. Personally I can take a bad OS launch or needing a little more maintaince on my PC, but I don’t want to fight them anymore for control of my own hardware.

      • zzz711@lemmy.ml
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        9 days ago

        For me it’s the removal and change of UI elements. There is still no built in way to move the task bar to the top or side of the screen and to get a useful right click menu back I have to go into the registry and change a value. There is also the whole thing where you are forced to use a Microsoft account with no option to use a local account instead.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          9 days ago

          Yeah, their momentum is no joke. This may accelerate the shift towards Linux somewhat.

          Kind of the same story for the Fediverse.

        • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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          9 days ago

          I’m expecting that Steam on Linux is going to be what drives it.

          The Steam Deck can be used as a Linux computer and almost a turnkey way for a manufacturer to build a Steam computer without Windows.

    • LunchMoneyThief@links.hackliberty.org
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      9 days ago

      Yeah no, Windows 11 IS far worse than Windows 10

      Yeah no, Windows 10 IS far worse than Windows 8

      Yeah no, Windows 8 IS far worse than Windows 7

      Perpetual Windows $VERSION_THAT_I_GREW_UP_WITH isn’t bad. No, it’s just this new one that’s terrible.

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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        9 days ago

        I thought 10 was an improvement on 8, in part because they walked back some changes to 8.

        I have yet to hear of a reason to go to 11.

      • Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        No, they’ve alternated between good and bad ever since 98.

        98 - good

        ME - bad

        XP - good

        Vista - bad

        7 - good

        8 - bad

        10 - good (eventually)

        11 - bad

      • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 days ago

        I grew up with XP, vista was worse and windows 7 was ust better. Windows 8 was terrible. Windows 10 better than 8 but worse than 7.

        I haven’t even try windows 11.

      • BlemboTheThird@lemmy.ca
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        9 days ago

        I don’t remember anyone saying 10 was worse than 8. Maybe buggier on launch, but stylistically it worked more like 7 than 8 did

    • Midnitte@beehaw.org
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      9 days ago

      It’s certainly better than Windows 8 and it’s awful mandatory touch interface.

    • gimmemahlulz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 days ago

      Windows 11 is ok, just like windows 10 was ok. It’s not great, but it’s not satan’s asshole like some people make it out to be. Most use it because they don’t really have a choice due to software constraints, or simply because they’ve been using windows for forever and that’s all they know.

      Personally I use linux because I like it more, though I still have a windows install for flightsimming. I think that it’s a perfectly fine operating system for the 80-90% of people who don’t care and just want their computer to be an appliance to get on social media or get work done.

      • Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 days ago

        That’s fair, I just like windows and that’s really all there is to it. I’ve had a few Linux installs in the past, but never really found an advantage to anything except compiling this one specific python library, but these days I can do that very easily running WSL, VS code SSH’d to my server or more recently a jupyter server that I can connect to from any device with a web browser.

        Now macOS on the other hand, I absolutely despise. It was one of the first OS’s I learnt to use back in primary school, and now that I have to use it for work I have absolutely no nice things to say. Unintuitive, missing basic features and slow to navigate, and I can assure you that none of this is due to unfamiliarity…

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      9 days ago

      I’ve actually heard mostly positive nostalgia for Vista recently. I think it might have been a situation where they released earlier than they should have, and so only the later versions were worthy.

      But also, do you even Linux, bro?

      Edit: Other comments are saying it just had really high hardware requirements.

  • Tug@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    I do not Linux. Actually, I don’t even computer. I do everything on my phone. The Vista machine is something offline to store photos and some docs.