 Few things strike fear, or perhaps loathing, into the hearts of PC enthusiasts more than the words, Windows Vista. That operating system's notoriety, as a buggy, slow, bloated mess, reaches far and wide. Then to the land of the Apple faithful, Vista was abhorred. Its successor, Windows 7, adored. But was Vista's heart truly evil, or simply misunderstood? Pushed out into a world that wasn't ready? Who can say? It is a terrible tale, but perhaps its telling may reveal new secrets. After this word from our sponsor. Memory Express is the go-to place for your electronic needs and services in Canada, and they're opening a new store in Victoria, BC. They're hiring for all positions, so check them out at the link in the video description. So I was reading a post written by Glassbomb on our forum, and it inspired a fairly lively debate in our weekly writers meeting. Was Windows Vista really that bad? You ask a dozen people, you'll get a dozen different answers. The one thing we all agreed on though, was that to answer the question fairly, we would have to get our hands on an ISO, and actually install it on a system. And we chose the $150 gaming PC that Riley and I put together. Mostly because it's from 2007, the year that Windows Vista launched. And how is it? Well, surprisingly, it works pretty well. System processes are snappy, and despite the outdated kind of janky looking UI, it's for better or for worse, Windows running just fine. In fact, it looks almost exactly like Windows 7. So how is it different then from Windows 7? And what's so bad about it? Well, the answer requires some history. Development of Windows Longhorn, actually named after the Longhorn Saloon and Grill in Whistler BC, if I present, began in 2001, the year that Windows XP was launched. Longhorn was supposed to launch in 2003, but a number of issues during development left Microsoft conflicted about which features to include in the new operating system, and which ones to add to Windows XP and Windows Server. This got so complicated that in 2004, development was effectively reset as team leaders changed and much of the code was scrapped and repurposed. This was also when Longhorn's product name was finalized to Vista with a tagline of clear, confident and connected. None of which had described Vista's development so far. Perhaps they were trying to ask the universe to throw them a freaking bone. There's actually a lot more I could say about the development, but frankly, we could make a whole video about that. So let's just leave it at the launch was delayed a few more times, bones were not thrown, and then finally on January 30th, 2007, Vista made its public debut. And that's really when the excrement hit the air circulation unit, so to speak. You see, Vista had a ton of new tricks up its sleeve, including the graphics intensive arrow UI with translucency effects and elements of the Windows back end that had been completely redone. So the hardware requirements were higher than probably anyone expected, which meant that at launch, Vista was slower than its predecessor on equivalent hardware. So users accused Microsoft of packing the OS full of bloat as part of a conspiracy to force them to upgrade their computers. Not that that would necessarily lead to a better experience anyway. Making its own foot more full of bullet holes than necessary, Microsoft allowed many pre-built PCs brand new ones, mind you, to be sold with Vista capable branding on the front that they created. But these PCs only met the requirements for Vista home basic, the second of the six different and very confusing additions of this software that existed. And because of this particular misstep, Microsoft actually got served a class action lawsuit for misleading marketing. On top of everything so far, many component and peripheral vendors didn't release updated drivers for Vista for their older or in some cases, even their existing products. So many users having experienced the relatively seamless migrations between various versions of Windows 9x or 2000 to XP, where drivers could in many cases be used interchangeably were outraged when particularly their wireless cards and printers just didn't work anymore. As for the hardware components that did work, well, because the drivers were so fundamentally different from the XP versions requiring extensive rewrites in many cases, even key system components from reputable vendors like graphics cards from Nvidia were prone to causing whole system crashes. Even when it was running normally, Vista managed to generate user IR2. While the new user account control feature, which prompted users for permissions to run programs and change settings, was a great step forward for system security, it appeared far too often and took control of the entire Windows interface until it could be dismissed. Annoying and confusing regular end users who just wanted the annoying pop-ups to stop so they could get their work done. And this is only a fraction of the complaints. It truly was a horrible launch and you could argue that it directly resulted in Apple increasing their OS X market share thanks to their wildly successful Mac versus PC commercials. Now some of the issues were addressed in service pack one for Vista, which launched a year later in 2008. But you know what else launched in 2008? Service pack three for Windows XP, which understandably left users confused about whether they should upgrade or just stick with XP. April 2009 then saw the release of service pack two for Vista, which addressed even more issues but by then we were five months away from everyone's favorite OS, Windows 7, which whether you want to admit it or not is very similar to Windows Vista with many of the improvements in performance and driver compatibility coming about simply because hardware in 2009 was better and driver developers had gained a lot of experience working with Windows Vista and 7 which were far more similar under the hood than XP and Vista were. Because like it or not, in some cases Vista wasn't bad as much as it was misunderstood and maybe a little ahead of its time. It was the beginning of a lot of really good stuff that we take for granted today. For example, it's all new memory management model used free RAM to load frequently used programs and files in the background to smooth out operation. Users didn't understand this. They just thought that Windows was hogging up all of their RAM for no apparent reason and arguably Microsoft could have done a better job of representing this. As for Windows Aero with its cool translucency effects, well it ran on the system's GPU. So if you had a discrete graphics card and you weren't experiencing crashes, which not everyone did by the way, I didn't, it ran very smoothly and looked so good that going back to the old way with Windows XP felt like caveman stuff. In fact, today, elements of Aero's translucent effects can be seen in all sorts of other UIs from Windows 10 to Mac OS to iOS. And as for the sidebar with its gadgets, well, that looks pretty laughable with our modern design sensibilities, but it was pretty trendy at the time. Apple's OS X Tiger also had widget mini apps, although they were kept on the dashboard, not the desktop, and live updating UI elements are now ubiquitous in modern OSes, including the live tiles in the Windows start menu. So those were kind of cool until a critical vulnerability was discovered that could leave your PC open to hackers. And guess what else Vista added? Instant search from the taskbar, built-in Windows Defender, built-in Windows Update, user-friendly data backup, BitLocker drive encryption, user account control, which in its modern, more refined form is an essential part of Windows security. And what's funny is that OS X these days, or Mac OS, excuse me, has something pretty similar. It also added DirectX 10 and games for Windows Live, which for all its faults was one of the first ways to enable gameplay between a console and a PC. Not to mention the completely redesigned print, display, peer-to-peer networking, and audio subsystems that laid the foundation for Windows 7 and its successors. Though I do have some issues with the changes they made to audio that effectively killed hardware accelerated sound. That's kind of a separate note though. So was Vista that bad? Yes. And also no, which together makes yo, because yo man, for real, for all its faults, and there were many, Windows Vista was a huge, if wobbly step in the right direction. And once it had settled in and received proper support, users seemed to appreciate it. In fact in 2008, a few months after releasing Vista Service Pack 1, Microsoft ran an ad campaign called the Mojave experiment, in which they invited users to vent about how much they hated Vista, and then try out Windows Mojave, the next version of Windows. And surprise, surprise, people actually loved it, and then cue the reveal, Mojave isn't Mojave, it's Vista. Really? What? Are you serious? This is Windows Vista. Now were people's reactions cherry picked to only include the good ones? Duh, of course. But based on my experience running Vista from day one, on what was at the time a high end system, I don't find it hard to believe at all that some people genuinely liked it, or even really liked it. Its main issue I think, is that by the time it had really gotten to the point where it was usable, Windows 7 was right around the corner, and Vista's reputation had been irreparably damaged. So despite the tech and feature advancements, Vista will, and should, continue to go down in history as the worst Windows launch ever, other than Windows ME. Just got colder in here. By the way, guys, just in case this story has convinced you to try to install Vista and use it, perhaps out of pity, please don't. Microsoft's support for the OS ended last year, and while we were using it, pretty much everything was covered in these scary, gigantic end of support messages. So it's not a secure thing to do. If you're a small business owner or a freelancer, FreshBooks is the accounting solution for you. It's a simple way to be more productive, more organized, and to get paid faster. 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Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join. I've got some stuff in my throat there. It was a little bit of fondness.