BleepingComputer.com: What's wrong with Vista?

I'm not sure whether this should go here or in General, but hey...

Why is it that everyone I know (except hopefully loads of you guys ) say that Vista's so bad?! I've been using it for over a year now and can't find anything wrong with it.
I've a growing theory that it's just people who don't know how to use it. They don't know that it's possible to make a non-working program work by running it as an administrator.
There's also the ones who don't know the difference between hardware drivers and their OS (a couple of friends say that their cameras and stuff don't work with Vista and blame that; I say that it's the companies' drivers are uncompatible with Vista (hope that's right)).
I find it offensive that so many people can casually slag off something I love so much (to me, it's the best pre-Windows 7 OS, bearing in mind I haven't spent much time on Mac OS X).

Can anyone shed some light on this?

PLEASE NO "MS released it early because of Mac OS X", "It's the same as Mac OS X" or anything else to do with it and Apple or Macs, 'cos that's just Apple and Apple fans' propoganda against MS. In most cases if not all.

The two biggest complaints were that Vista really required more hardware than most people had at the time, and of hardware driver issues. The hardware issue is sort of a minor gripe with me, but I can see people being upset that Vista forced them into an upgrade. The driver compatibility issue mostly came about because of lack of 64 bit support for hardware. Not Microsoft's fault really. I have no hard numbers to support how many people run a 64 bit OS, but if I go by the people that I know, 1 out of 30 people or so were actually running 64 bit at the time. That one person had a really bad time getting all of his devices to work properly. eventually the hardware manufacturers got their drivers updated.

The other issue that you touched on is the security model employed by Vista. Quite a bit more restrictive than what people were used to. I have a hard time faulting Microsoft for this because people spent so much time bashing Windows because of a perceived lack of security due to rampant malware, Microsoft had to do something. Dammed if you do......

The bad press that resulted from it though failed to mention specifics of why their were issues. All that anybody heard was that Vista blew chunkies. After that, people just perpetuated the story that Vista was bad without really knowing why.

I have various flavors of Vista on all of my systems, and rarely have an issue with it. I have one laptop that refuses to load up my profile once in a while, and that is it. Vista and I get along just great. I doubt that I am even going to worry about Windows 7 at this point in time because I am happy with what I have.

Here, here! All agreed, and thankyou for some help clearing up on this.
If anyone else still wishes to share any more, please feel free to.

Vista was a drastic change from XP - and people generally don't like change.

Most of the complaints that I've seen have come from people who wanted their old stuff to work with Vista - and the drivers weren't available. But, would you buy a brand new car and put retread tires on it? If you want the latest in technology, you've gotta be prepared to pay the price for having it. FWIW - I had an old Toshiba laptop that was not Vista compatible - yet we got Vista to run on it. I also had a Hauppage TV Card that wasn't Vista compatible (and still isn't) - rather than whine about it, I disabled the card and used other means to get my TV on my monitor.

Other complaints revolve around the hardware requirements - and this is as much a function of the rapidly increasing hardware development as it is with the sophistication of the OS. People want more - they want more stuff to run faster on their systems, so they've gotta get new hardware to do this. This is sorta like expecting your Chevy to perform like a Ferrari - if you don't have the horsepower under the hood, you just can't get the blistering performance no matter what you do.

Software developers have added to this problem (IMO) by making programs that use more and more memory - resulting in Vista bloat coming along much sooner than XP bloat did. It's not uncommon to see people recommending 4gB of RAM for Vista systems these days - just due to the increased demands that the latest software puts on the system.

Finally...Security. Microsoft has been slammed repeatedly over the years for the perceived lack of security in it's OS's. Microsoft recommended that all users run as Limited Users in XP - and it was ignored by nearly everyone. So, with Vista, they made it more difficult to run as an Administrator - and more difficult for software developers to write programs that didn't follow their recommendations. The UAC prompt is the result of this. It's not there to upset the users, it's there to make life difficult for the software developers who don't follow Microsoft's guidelines. Which would you rather have - a program that installs and runs without repeated UAC prompts, or one that nags you every couple of minutes? The hope is that software developers will respond to this and write programs that don't require Administrator permissions to run.

I love Vista. It's much more stable on my systems - and I do quite a lot of software testing/operating system manipulation on my systems.
When it does crash, it's much easier to figure out why - and the error reporting tools are much more robust also, giving me loads of information on why it's behaving badly.

usasma, on Jan 25 2009, 06:36 PM, said:

Morning: I recently upgraded to Vista Ultimate, and yes there is a learning curve. I adapted quickly, and the audio is a great improvement over XP. I am waiting to use the 64 bit disk, for now 32 bit is great for my uses,Alan