What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider's Retrospective
Vista was amazing.<p>I see two reasons for why it has such a bad reputation.<p>1. It exposed how terrible device manufacturers are at writing drivers. nVidia alone (which only has niche hardware) themselves stood for the majority of Vista BSODs. And no printer or scanner company had probably written a device driver in a decade now so it took another 5 years for them to catch up (and they just continued creating bloat ever since).<p>Yes there were major architectural changes but this was the <i>perfect</i> opportunity since it was the first MS (consumer) mainstream 64 bit OS (I don&#x27;t count the 64 bit version XP). Unfortunately the driver situation made things rather different between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of windows, this did not help.<p>2. Pre-fetch&#x2F;super-fetch or whatever they called it was WAY to aggressive. If you had a decent amount of RAM on launch day, or just a new regular computer 6 months after launch, the pre-fetching algorithms were so aggressive that they completely overloaded the harddrives that perform terrible with that random access load. It meant that the first 10 minutes after boot was spent trying to speed up that you might want to do at the extreme cost of slowing down things you actually wanted to do. Yes they were supposed to be run with low priority but it really exposed how bad spinning harddrives are at multitasking. If doing one task takes 1s, doing two tasks each taking 1s will now take 9 seconds if run in parallel etc.<p>After enough time this wasn&#x27;t a problem as all your freely available RAM had been used up by prefetch or actual programs. If you seldom rebooted you never had to worry about it. But the regular user wants to use the computer right away after boot and will only remember the agonizing slowness of trying to start the browser and office applications after boot.<p>Compared to Vista, Windows 7 was just a new (much better) taskbar, better tuned prefetch and with the very important difference that by the time Windows 7 arrived the drivers had matured and many of them even supported 64 bit systems... But that was all that was needed for Vista to be seen as a disaster and Windows 7 an unparalleled success.