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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

What seems to be happening (to me) is roughly every other generation MS makes massive changes to the OS which most people hate for being different, then they release a new version of the OS which is just basically polishing those features, maybe walking a couple back, and that becomes the "beloved" version of windows.

People hated Vista, and loved 7. Yet 7 was really just vista with a bit of polish. What changed is when 7 came out the average computer capabilities had gone up significantly.

People hated 8, but loved 10. The only real difference between the two is MS dropping the weird tablet mode that nobody wanted/asked for.

People currently hate 11, I suspect 12 will be loved mostly because MS will back off a bit on some of the new innovative UI changes and advertising everywhere.

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7 had very clearly optimized what was bloated and inefficient in Vista. It wasn't just that PCs were more powerful, there were many cases of 7 running better on systems that Vista would struggle with. The minimum requirements for 7 dropped considerably

Personally I think 98, 2000, XP, 7, and to a lesser 10, were all stellar releases from Microsoft. None of those would be the GOAT, but the closest in my mind was 7, which dropped when I was doing tech journalism and I had the time and space to poke at it in an extended fashion

> The minimum requirements for 7 dropped considerably

Nope. They were raised.

Vista's minimum requirements were [1]

    A modern processor (at least 800MHz)
    512 MB of system RAM memory
    A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable

7's [2]

    a 1 GHz or faster processor
    1 GB (32-bit OS) or 2 GB (64-bit OS) of RAM,
    16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit) available disk space
    a DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver.

[1] https://techjourney.net/windows-vista-minimum-and-recommende...

[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...

What changed was the availability/cost of hardware and much improved graphics driver situation. Vista RTM had some serious driver performance issues thanks to the new WDDM. Although resolved later in it's lifecycle, it was too late to shed that stigma.

Plus Vista's UAC was far too intrusive.

> Plus Vista's UAC was far too intrusive.

I agree, but I think that technology journalists were too harsh on this aspect of Vista. It was Microsoft's only really serious attempt at shoring up single-user security on Windows, and I think that its poor reception contributed to Microsoft neglecting to make any improvements thereafter. xkcd.com/1200 is still embarrassing relevant over a decade later.

I think it was too early really. These days everyone bugs you with confirmation screens. IOS, macOS, Android all do it too.

But in the vista days security was not yet so much on the radar for most people. In fact even for companies. I remember working for a company where all the laptops had the same local admin password which was the company name + "123". I'm not exaggerating. There was also no full disk encryption used. These were also the days most websites would use plain http.

With that in mind I just don't think the importance was clear yet to most users. They just saw the negatives, not the benefits. Post Stuxnet and Wannacry/NotPetya things are really different.

Ps: it wasn't like that for all of course. I also worked for another company in the late 90s that had all their laptops equipped with windows NT 4.0 with full disk encryption (aftermarket of course as it wasn't yet built in), managed admin account and the whole shebang.

Vista was absolutely unusable at that minimum configuration, but 7 was at its.

Time has probably colored my memory some. But pound for pound 7 ran better than Vista on equivalent hardware.

I can't think of the "why", but I never got to tinker with 7. I think I jumped from XP to 8. I remember I had installed "Longhorn" for fun on a secondary PC, but I stayed at 8 and 8.1 (with ClassicShell) for many many years. I only jumped to 10 when I realized that my 2015 laptop can live and thrive even today with Win10Pro due to their amazing RAM/CPU performance (with some heavy fine-tuning)(black viper!![0],[1] even if the pages no longer exist I still keep them on my favorites!!)

  [0]: https://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-8-1-service-configurations/
  [1] http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-10-service-configurations/

It was said/suggested on SecurityNow from someone in the audience that "hey why don't you use Windows 20YY Server? It's like your home/pro Windows but without the shitware" (loosely reworded by me)

> The minimum requirements for 7 dropped considerably

Typical nonsense people believe because it feels true.

Vista was perfectly fine. The problem was trying to run a 2006 OS on a 2001 machine during a time of both great stagnation in OEMs and great progress overall.

I used Windows Vista beta as my primary OS on my new computer that summer and that thing was amazing.

> People currently hate 11, I suspect 12 will be loved mostly because MS will back off a bit on some of the new innovative UI changes and advertising everywhere.

Oh I'm sure it will be radically different.

I expect they will rename windows to "Copilot" or Windows Copilot" just like they have done with most of their other products like Microsoft 365. I'm not even joking.

They just seem so hell-bent on destroying their existing branding, even more than they normally are. Looks like they have a huge fear of missing that AI boat and becoming irrelevant.

At the same time they are building a catalogue that's so difficult to understand because everything is called Copilot now. I've even seen their own sales people get confused about what's what.

Copilot is sort of a better name for an operating system powered by AI than Windows.

Personally I don't care what they name their services because I've already determined I want nothing more to do with them.

It's not powered by AI though. It's just got a bunch of teasers and upselling ads for AI cloud services. Doesn't really have much to do with the OS.

The same with office, there was no point in renaming it to Copilot especially because the standard license doesn't even come with the Copilot features in office.

> People hated 8, but loved 10.

I think the pattern holds for Windows 7 and Vista. I don't know anyone who remembers Windows 10 fondly, and on a personal level I hated both 8 and 10.

I also don't share your optimism regarding Windows 12. You or I might consider switching to Linux, but 95% of the population has never heard of Linux and even fewer will ever install it. Then there is MacOS, which is gated behind hardware that is prohibitively expensive, as well as having a limited selection of software available; also a non-starter. Microsoft isn't going to back off of user-hostile practices unless they lose a series of anti-trust suits. They were already forced to allow users to uninstall Edge in the EU and they region-locked the functionality so that users outside of the EU were still stuck with Edge. They are in the mass surveillance game for the long haul.

I see what you mean.. but if you take a look at vista vs 7..

Microsoft shoved glass panels, widgets and such down the user's throat in Vista. It was a new look and they wanted to make you realise it. Without spinning a fresh 7 machine now, I'm certain it was very toned down.

But, I could be very wrong about this :D Last time I used Windows was XP (I mean, granted last week) because nostalgia is a real thing :D

Edit: I can't reply (not sure why, thread too deep?) but @cogman10, you're right! My memory is bad :(

> Without spinning a fresh 7 machine now, I'm certain it was very toned down.

I think they were roughly the same

Vista: https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Windows-Vista-Ne...

Windows 7: https://blog.thinprint.com/uploads/tp/sites/6/2019/08/319410...

I never tried with Vista but I customized the appearance of Windows 7 on my old computer and it looked nothing like this. I remember lots of people hated the frosted glass look when it first released, and personally I never got used to it. The OS peaked aesthetically with Windows 2000 and has been on a steady decline since then.

>Without spinning a fresh 7 machine now, I'm certain it was very toned down

Your memories are not serving you well. Windows 7 was very glass and very aero when it was first released.

You can disable the transparency and fake glossiness, but then it's just a pale blue glossy glass colour instead of transparent.

  1) Install any Windows version from the past decade in any machine
  2) Go to 'performance' and remove all visuals
  3) download and install ClassicShell to have a decent Start button
  4) download and use (most are portable) any Privacy settings tool
  5) find, download and install WindowsFirewallControl v4.9.x.x and use it on MediumFiltering with "Display Notifications" (you get the 'ZoneAlarm experience')
  6) Uninstall all the crapware and disable many services (I use SysInternals Autoruns64)(Winternals for the older ones)
  7) Happy Days!!

Wow, that's a lot more work than my Fedora setup.

Windows is only free if you don't value your time, huh?

Microsoft put bread on my table. I started working in a company that was operating 99% of their servers with MS OS. I don't see it that "I am wasting time", I see it that there is this tech called "Windows" and the more I know about Registry, DLLs, etc. is making me better at my job.

If Fedora setup puts food on your table, go for it!! I 'bet' on Microsoft for my career and it has taken me around the world multiple times, so yeah :)

Tbh I don't change machines 'that' often. My laptop is from 2015. My desktop is 3? 4? years old, and I won't be changing either in the next 5-6 years, they do 'ok' for home use.

But every now and then (couple of years) I do buy some second-hand cheap Surface, or HP Elite, or similar Win tablets, I set them up, and keep them on the side (OS, and Firefox only) just in case someone will need an urgent laptop, or I travel somewhere and I want a 'burner' machine with zero data/sw in it.

> Microsoft shoved glass panels, widgets and such down the user's throat

Please listen to yourself. It's just a style, they didn't kill your dog. The UI was fine, beautiful even, especially coming from Lego XP — which if you think about it was really tacky, literally an RGB palette.

7 has significant kernel improvements that dramatically improves its performance, as well as huge changes to its graphics system that heavily reduced memory usage. (Data that was mirror in system ram wasn't anymore, dropping local RAM usage.)

If you threw enough horse power at, vista could be fast, but it would always end up using more resources than windows 7.

> The only real difference between the two is MS dropping the weird tablet mode that nobody wanted/asked for.

I mean, that's a significant difference. It was well justified to hate Windows 8 when they screwed up the main UI for the entire OS as badly as they did.

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