MS had a pretty good thing going with 2000 and then XP. They they put a lot of effort into destroying that first with Vista and then Windows 8. I feel Windows has never recovered from there.
Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family.
Vista was much better in that regard but had issues in performance of the UI (chasing compositing interfaces that Mac and Linux had for years before) and the annoyance of UAC. Both were good ideas but required buy-in from hardware and software vendors that was slow to arrive.
I remember the regular cleaning sessions I had to do for my mother. Which stopped once I got her a Mac mini.
I liked Windows 2000.
XP was a bloated mess to me (in 2001) and I switched to Linux, and started upgrading a discarded PowerMac I'd been given until it was usefully able to run the shiny new Mac OS X.
10.0, 10.1, 10.2 started to get stable and quick enough to be useful for some tasks, 10.3 sealed the deal and became my full-time desktop.
From that moment on, we could spend a lot more time talking, watching her TV shows, cooking. It's a quality of life issue.
WDM made graphics driver crashes not take down the OS plus no more window tearing
Shadow copies gave you file history (time machine without another drive)
No more running with full admin privileges all the time. Bitlocker was introduced
Yes, compatibility issues affected people to various degrees, and yes it required good hardware to run well. Intel's onboard graphics / 5400 rpm drives we're not kind to it. And there were too many editions
With good hardware Vista was peak Windows. I could go back to Vista but I couldn't go back to XP, there's too much we take for granted now
Still, it is an underappreciated technology even today, the ability to get a consistent/ incremental point in time backup
It's not like they got rid of shadow copy entirely so I don't know why they got rid of the file restoration UI
I'll be sad when they finally kill off wbadmin, I script that for nightly imaging to an external drive. I get multiple snapshots to restore to, I can mount the backups (vhdx) as a disk for quick-and-dirty access, and it is technically possible to do point in time file restore but in typical Microsoft fashion it's artificially limited, I've had to fire up an evaluation copy of Windows Server in a VM to do it. Argh
Conversely, there were plenty of times when volume shadow copy running was the problem.
Talking about my use of home PCs, of course.
I've literally never experienced a moment of "wow, I wish I had a shadow copy in place so I could help solve this problem."
I guess my backup solutions are more primitive, but certainly more predictable in terms of their effect on the system. I didn't turn off volume shadow copy for my own amusement, I turned it off because it was freezing some devices' availability for I/O while it did its work.
* I think it was not in Home Edition, so yes, thumbs down on that
It really wasn't. You can say XP was an enhancement of 2000, but Vista was it's own thing, they reworked a lot of the NT Kernel and moved stuff like audio and video drivers from kernel space to user space, which brough increased security and stability, but broke compatibility on hardware that didn't bring updated drivers which pissed off a lot of early adopters of vista.
- in explorer, Vista could show column headers in all views (not just details) making it easy to sort/group
- you could use the headers to set grouping
- grouping still showed all the files
- the left tree became buggy in Windows 7, it doesn't always scroll to the current folder (I think it's broken to this day)
- the "quick access" shortcuts in explorer (the top list) was its own section (so you could always click it) -- in 7 and later it is part of the tree so you have to scroll back up to use it
- dragging files into a folder in 7+ instantly sorts them in the view, rather than keeping them together until hitting F5
- windows media player got rid of "find in library", "recently added" playlist, "play all", the taskbar miniplayer
- Vista had peak taskbar tray. instead of the current all-or-nothing overflow thing, overflow icons would automatically show themselves and then hide again
- can't run Explorer as administrator anymore to temporarily access protected files
- movie maker gone, dvd maker gone, sidebar gone
> WDM made graphics driver crashes not take down the OS plus no more window tearing
It made it more stable, I don't care about tearing and stuff, but it robbed me of full-screen DOS windows and the ability to toggle a window to/from full-screen with Alt+Enter. I used that a lot.
> Shadow copies gave you file history (time machine without another drive)
But it's no use if the OS isn't stable enough to trust. So I kept my important stuff on servers, so lost this.
The same applies to openSUSE today.
> No more running with full admin privileges all the time.
A small win, for standalone machines.
> Bitlocker was introduced
Life is too short.
> yes it required good hardware to run well.
Never mind that. Nothing except the highest-end premium kit had the specs to run it well. You needed 2GB of RAM for half decent performance but new kit was shipping with 512MB.
> With good hardware Vista was peak Windows.
Nah. Not as bad as generally held, but not great.
> I could go back to Vista but I couldn't go back to XP, there's too much we take for granted now
I did:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/dangerous_pleasures_w...
It was glorious.
I’m a big fan of XKCD but, in reality, what most people (and employers) worry about is unauthorised third-party access to private data in the event a laptop is lost or stolen (most often by opportunist theft). Bitlocker — and other Full Disk Encryption technology — provide an effective mitigation for this situation.
But what is much more rarely discussed are the costs. There are multiple penalties.
It hurts performance.
It impedes dual-boot.
It impedes setup in general; you lose most of the nice friendly GUI tools, replaced by clunky harder CLI tools.
It makes data recovery vastly harder, which is one of those things people discount until they need it and then realise how critical it is.
It makes troubleshooting OS problems vastly harder. Many it simply prevents: the answer becomes, reinstall your OS and restore from backup. If you have no backups, tough.
It's inconvenient, unless you use modern TPM-backed systems, in which case it dramatically reduces the security benefits, while also severely reducing OS compatibility.
It adds a new vital credential people don't know they have and don't know they need to keep secure backups of.
It generally makes everything worse, to fix a threat that most people simply do not have.
The 2 employers I personally had who insisted on it published all the company info on my machines to Github anyway, making it not even security theatre. More like security pantomime: an act of pretending to pretend to do something.
The answer to all this is, in my experience as tech support type: don't do it. Conduct a proper analysis of who has what secrets and what they need to keep, and use other better-targeted tools just for them.
Because without that, it causes problems for no good reason. It's treated as a panacea but it isn't -- it fixes nothing for 99% of users -- and the very real problems and issues it causes are ignored.
This _may_ be worth it for some companies and organisations but it's not for anyone else. I can see its worth for governments and military forces but few others.
I run GNU/Linux on all my personal computers but the Windows 10 laptop from work came with Bitlocker installed and other than entering the PIN on start-up, it stays out of my way. Granted, I'm not dual-booting, saving important documents or running any backup tools; I mostly use it for browsing, Teams calls and SSHing into my Fedora workstation and other servers after connecting via VPN.
Also, in my case, performance was only noticeably affected when the IT contractors installed Symantec anti-virus which resulted in the laptop becoming a noisy heater every so often.
For what it's worth, I bought my wife a laptop for her birthday when she needed a new one and I never considered enabling Bitlocker on it. She wouldn't have any sensitive data on it so I figured there's no need.
If it's a Win11 machine with Secure Boot then there is a high chance it has Bitlocker on by default. You should probably check and disable it if you don't want it. It'll be a little faster, and easier to recover if anything goes wrong.
ABAN is the modern free replacement for DBAN once that went payware.
That's an exaggeration. I didn't have the highest-end premium kit. I had good hardware (I was a gamer after all), but I doubt very much if I had more than 2 GB memory and I ran Vista with zero performance issues whatsoever.
It did have faster file copying though. I'd say it had 64-bit for more memory addressing but that was actually available with XP as well.