My dad still uses a Vista desktop regularly (a 2007 install) and as far as I can tell it still works perfectly fine for him. I suppose he's probably leaving far too much to chance, but still.
In those days, I remember seeing Vista laptops with 1 GB of RAM, on which Vista was unusable. People had to edit arcane registry settings to disable the "Aero" look-and-feel, and drop down to a more Windows 95-like display just to run at all.
It really was basically fraud, and infuriated everybody. If Microsoft had been more realistic about their "certified for Vista" specs, it probably wouldn't have been such a flop. On the other hand, new laptops jumping from 1 GB of RAM to 4 GB minimum overnight would have been a hard consumer sell, I suppose.
UAC issues cleared up once all of the software developers got around to releasing the next versions of their applications, but MS took most of the blame. I can't really blame the developers for not wanting to make significant changes to their software before the final release of Vista, given the chain of events leading from XP to Vista. Many are already hard pressed to remember how rocky the XP release was, and that MS did much more in XP to make 3rd party applications work with the system. In Vista they essentially took the extra step to warn the user that the application was misbehaving, rather than silently letting it happen. Some people got into the habit of disabling UAC by default and I had to convince one person who should have known better that he wasn't going to suffer from a deluge of support calls if he stopped disabling it in Windows 7 (and the handful of Vista systems still around).
In the end, 7 put very little in terms of functionality or stability on top of Vista SP1, though Microsoft did put significant work into making it possible to run 7 on systems that didn't have the horsepower for Vista. The marketing push brought a lot of people around. I look at it as an essential part of the strategy they're currently using with Windows 10 (vs. 8), though they took the extra step of changing the underlying version number this time around (something they didn't do when going from Vista to 7).
The biggest problems with continuing to run Vista are that the support window is rapidly closing and 7 will usually perform better on the same hardware (because they toned down the UI and put real effort into getting 7 to work on hardware that was previously running XP).
1. Vista disabled parallel ports direct access, new cnc machines, or people using old printers and scanners still use xp.
2. Vista removed support for directx before dx10... Microsoft realized later how shitty idea that was, but instead added dx9 and below emulation layer. The problem is that it only works almost 100% right on win 7, thus why many gamers still use it ( instead of 8+ where some good games are very buggy or slow )
3. Vista audio model disallowed drivers to do anything that could be used to disable hdmi drm. As side effect all 3d sound cards stopped working properly. Lots of people blamed Creative and other sound card makers, that got generally screwed... now that this tech proved to be essential for vr gpu companies are doing workarounds, for example AMD has as selling point of TruAudio that it skips Windows normal audio stack.
This was addressed twofold, as far as I understand: 1) Application developers were railroaded into best practices and forced not to do terrible design ideas, and 2) MS introduced a whole load of compatibility features such as virtualising folders transparently so when bad apps still tried to do bad things, it was securely captured and diverted around requiring a UAC elevation prompt.
Regarding the stability issues, Vista's driver model was new when compared to XP. Naturally, the number of bugs in drivers increased initially but slowly settled down. Much of the '7 is more stable / faster than Vista' groupthink is the result of bad drivers getting better in the intervening years.
> The project, however, failed completely and development had to reset. More than three years late Microsoft released Windows Code Name 'Longhorn' as Windows Vista.
Is this incorrect, or not the full story?
edit: less confrontational
I did. I also worked at Microsoft during the years in question.
edit in response to your edit: The project was restarted. Longhorn and its three pillars were essentially thrown out. Windows Vista was rebuilt from scratch on top of Windows Server 2003. I assume they chose to keep the same codename so as to reduce confusion. But that doesn't mean it was the same OS.
Hopefully this Wikipedia article answers the rest of your questions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista#M...
edit 2: here's another article:
It was decided, at least for now, to drop or modify many of the
original objectives; no more using C#, abandon WinFS, and revise Avalon.
> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
After a couple of months, we made the complete switch (deinstall the email client on windows and create more gmail accounts).
Now, I boot on windows less than once per year. I have to thank the driver problems of vista 64 (and the other minor defects of Vista 64) for making this migration possible (it is difficult to leave a system we are used to).
My only problem now is that I would like to buy a new computer and I am worried about the full support of all my future hardware.
I have been using Virtualbox to deal with everything I need to do in Windows rather than going through the hassle of rebooting the machine. I use Windows for Active Directory administration, the occasional document that doesn't look right in LibreOffice, and occasionally jumping into Adobe software. My next computer at work is going to be a MacBook Pro with a Windows 10 VM, but at that point I should have most of the Adobe and MS Office tasks covered in OS X instead of the VM.
As for VirtualBox, strange but I just yesterday spent 2 hours trying my best to use it and failing. It just wouldn't resize the window beyond some tiny vga thing. None of the online help did squat; none of the menus and settings had any affect. So I finally gave up. That thing has a ways to go before its useful for a desktop environment.