back to article Hasta la Windows Vista, baby! It's now officially dead – good riddance

Farewell, Windows Vista, we hardly knew ye. But as of now* you're out of support and even-more-unloved than was previously the case. Vista appeared in January 2007 and quickly irked users with a feature called “User Account Control” that produced constant queries about whether they wanted to do something. Microsoft added that …

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      1. Jay 2

        Re: Won't miss it

        That's a fair point and I'm sure it doesn't help. Though in reply to that, the fact that the Win7/10 (in my case) updates systems are so slow and somewhat broken from a user experiece point of view still causes me grief.

        Win 7 update is horribly slow, but at least it will give you an idea of how much data it is trying to download and how long it might take. Plus you can pick and choose when to down load and install. Win 10 is not only horribly slow it, it downloads when it feels like it and gives no indication as to how much it's attempting to download and then how long it may take. And in both cases there's the crappy thing where you shut the box down and it sits there twiddling its thumbs installing stuff and then when it comes back up again it will do the same thing. Then you find out that due to dependancies, there are still more updates required, so repeat. Admittedly the last bit is lessened if you do it more often!

        I'm glad for my own main usage Macs aren't quite as bad for updates (they do the shutdown/install thing) and at work it's Linux so just one reboot sorts you out. I feel sorry for the poor buggers who after to look after Win in the enterprise.

        1. TonyJ

          Re: Won't miss it

          Wouldn't argue with any of that.

  1. MacroRodent

    I wonder if Vista activation

    still works if I need to reinstall it? (have an instance in a VirtualBox, just for an emergency case a Windows is needed on my Linux laptop).

    1. Version 1.0 Silver badge

      Re: I wonder if Vista activation

      I should still work - I activated one a couple of weeks ago.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I wonder if Vista activation

        Even XP activates fine though the support ended couple years ago. Windows Update won't work anymore unless you fiddle with the "embedded XP" settings.

        I faintly _recall_ reading that MS would produce a tool (crack?) if they ever disabled the activation services. This was around 2001 (when XP came to be) and people were understandably curious (to put it mildly) about software activation.

  2. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Interestingly never had any BSOD's on the Gigabyte laptops that Vista was bundled with.

    Replaced Vista with Win7, same laptop just keep on chugging away, with a bit of performance improvements.

    So glad I did not "upgrade" to 10, just nixed the upgrade with Never10 from Gibson.

  3. Unicornpiss
    Meh

    User Account Control..

    The OS equivalent of having to take off your shoes and belt at the airport to go through security. Except Security only makes you do it once, not every time you do something more complex than scratching yourself.

    A necessary evil? Maybe. A royal pain the the ass. Assuredly.

    1. dajames

      Re: User Account Control..

      A necessary evil? Maybe. A royal pain the the ass. Assuredly.

      Microsoft dug themselves a great big stinking hole when, in XP, they made every new user account an Administrator account by default. Those with a clue changed that (and had to use "Run as", or an explicit Administrator login, to install and configure stuff).

      In Vista they did The Right Thing ™ and made new user accounts non-Administrator by default. Had that been all that they did it really would have been a PITA as about 104% * of all home users -- not knowing about Administrator accounts -- would have been unable to install or configure their own PCs.

      UAC was the answer to that. It did a couple of things that increased security (like blocking apps from hooking the keyboard, to prevent keyloggers (and some keyboard macro utilities) from working) but mostly it reduced security in a supposedly-controlled way to help users work more-or-less as before with non-Administrator accounts. You should not have seen a pop-up unless UAC was asking whether you wanted a process to be allowed to elevate its privileges -- and that's something that a user really ought to want to know about. Anyone who doesn't care deserves to get pwned.

      The big problem with UAC is that the version in Vista, at launch, was buggy and occasionally asked for elevated privileges when it didn't need them (and didn't ask for them when it did), and occasionally effected the elevation without asking ("Citation Needed", but I've been told that was the case). The Windows 7 version of UAC is much more robust and hardly any trouble at all.

      So: Necessary: Arguably, yes. Evil: Not so much. Pain in the bum? More a minor annoyance of the sort that one should be grateful for.

      [* To a first approximation.]

      1. Mage Silver badge

        Re: User Account Control..

        It was the success of Win9x and badly ported Win 9X software to Win 2K and XP written using no security or understanding that meant XP was being misused.

        Sage, GST/GSP (Designworks / Pressworks), games, etc all badly written from NT point of view. If you used XP with typical NT4.0 security and user account settings most popular software would not install or run as it was really only tested / designed for Win9x, or in some cases Win3.x

    2. PickledAardvark

      Re: User Account Control..

      UAC -- unlike many airport "security" measures -- is real security. UAC asks whether you want to make some potentially evil change to your computer. It is an alert (or prompt for admin password) that something wishes to change Windows.

      As many people at Microsoft observed when Vista was beta software, UAC can only work if a security prompt is displayed rarely. It has to be an exceptional event rather than a dialog where you press the "Whatever" button to get rid. When developing Windows 7, Microsoft listened to its internal critics.

      Can browse-by malware -- viewing a web page -- change Windows OS settings? Sadly, yes, but there is less thanks to UAC.

      1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

        Re: User Account Control..

        Try changing the local security policy on Windows 7 to activate secure desktop and raise the level of UAC. You'll see this raises the prompting almost to Vista levels, and requires entering a password instead of simply clicking - just as it should be under any secure OS.

        It's true that Vista did have a few un-necessary prompts, but mostly it was due to poorly written software.

        Once properly written software is installed and normal installation admin tasks completed, it's unusual to see the UAC in Vista.

        1. Unicornpiss
          Meh

          Re: User Account Control..

          I actually don't mind entering a password for administrative tasks. (as in Linux) But useful though it may be, having the screen turn a different shade and having to find the warning and click on it is somehow just more annoying. And sometimes during software installs it sits in the taskbar without properly notifying you (in Win 10) leaving you to wonder why your software isn't installing until you poke around and notice it.

          I'm not saying it doesn't add security, just that it's annoying, especially when doing certain Enterprise software installs that use multiple components installed by script--so you get notified multiple times for the same install unless you disable UAC beforehand.

          I like it when my credit card company alerts me to suspicious or unusual transactions. But I would not enjoy it if they called me every day when I buy lunch with my card.

  4. shawn.grinter

    Embiggen

    WTF....

    1. dajames
      Headmaster

      Re: Embiggen

      WTF....

      That's just Reg-speak for "embigrify".

    2. hmv

      Re: Embiggen

      Indeed.

      It's not a word, and it's sufficiently rancid that it should never become one. Try "enlarge"; it's not only a real word but it's actually shorter.

      1. I am the liquor

        Re: Embiggen

        What do you mean it's not a word? Sounds perfectly cromulent to me.

        1. Steve K

          Re: Embiggen

          Yes, and completely spidulary with existing linguistic gramostications:

          Embolden - to boldify more

          Embiggen - to biggify more

          Emtwentyfive - to drive round in circles more

          1. LionelB Silver badge

            Re: Embiggen

            Big: adjective. Verb forms: embiggen, bignify. Adverbial form: bigly. Abstract noun: bignation.

          2. Quotes

            Re: Embiggen

            ...to the book depository!

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7VjtZf0hF4

            1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

              Re: Embiggen

              "...to the book depository!"

              No, the other one... Red Dwarf - Tikka To Ride (the bit I mean starts around 19:45 minutes in if you want to fast-forward).

    3. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Embiggen

      Not a Simpsons fan, I take it?

    4. Hollerithevo

      Re: Embiggen

      I am a self-confessed grammar nazi and I love 'embiggen' because it adds to the jollity of language. Lighten up.

      1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

        Re: Embiggen

        Did someone say grammar nazi?

  5. David Austin

    Vista:

    A Necessary, but Painful step to Windows 7.

    With so many Longhorn Restarts, and 6 years since a new OS, I get the feeling Microsoft frantically cobbled together whatever parts it gout get running into a workable OS.

    Shame WinFS Died a death then: That was the most promising bit of tech from the stack.

  6. Mage Silver badge
    Windows

    One news site called it MS's worst Windows.

    Vista by default was a pig. But unlike ME, you could get it to run reliably and with security. Windows ME might be the worse, and was pointless compared to Windows 98 SE, and "Real Windows with USB existed as Windows 2000, or without USB as NT4.0.

    Windows 10 is worst than Vista as nothing has so lacked customisation since before Windows 3.1, also its update mechanisms and lack of privacy.

    Windows 7 should have been free to Vista users as it was essentially a bug fix, finishing off etc, even more so than XP compared to the unfinished and rushed Windows 2000.

    So, no I don't mourn Vista. OTOH, Windows 7 seems to be Microsoft's last competent Windows and little really compared to what a decent Service Pack for XP, no wonder XP users were so slow to upgrade.

    MS has been in decline, quality & design wise since 2002 -2003. Probably Office 2003 was last decent office, the last updates to Visual Studio before VS.Net, Advanced Server 2000 and Windows XP Client. The Server 2003 had incredible bloat, we changed to Linux exclusively for server when win 2000 Server became EOL for us.

    Now only one Windows user left. They will get Linux Mint on next refresh as all the programs used are also on Linux.

  7. handleoclast
    Mushroom

    Windows versions as sandwiches

    It was Vista that caused me to think of Windows in terms of sandwiches. Specifically, the pre-packed ones from supermarkets. The ones where you're not entirely sure how appetising they are until you open them.

    For a baseline, XP was a BLT. Not haute cuisine, but tasty and filling. Those capable of working out how to customize it could discard the lettuce (an evil foodstuff) and enhance with brown sauce and/or ketchup. Not filet mignon with all the trimmings (even if it was priced the same), but by Microsoft standards (95, 95, ME) it was good.

    Vista was a dog egg sandwich, heavily marketed by the supermarket. Since dogs don't lay eggs, you figured it was a novelty name. Sorta like toad in the hole, which isn't made with toads (or holes). Sorta like spotted dick, which isn't made with diseased sexual organs. Sorta like hot dogs, which aren't made with dogs (except in Korea). Like everybody else, you wanted to try the new, overly-hyped flavour. You got it home, eagerly opened it, then realized that dogs DO lay eggs: they squat, lay the egg, then the owner has to bag it and bin it or risk being fined. Puts you off sandwiches for a long time afterwards.

    Win 7 is BLT + mayo. Harder to discard the lettuce without things getting messy, and horrible if you don't like mayo, and tastes a bit weird when you add brown sauce, but otherwise tolerable.

    Win 8 is a double-decker dog egg sandwich made with mouldy bread. So vile it made you wish for Vista's dog egg with non-mouldy bread.

    Win 10 is BLT with a smear of dog egg (because they had a lot left over from the Win 8 fiasco). Oh, and they'll soon be wanting you to pay a support fee for each minute it stays in your digestive system, because sandwich-as-a-service.

    [Icon chosen for the hover text]

    1. Bob Vistakin
      Headmaster

      Re: Windows versions as sandwiches

      It's so refreshing to see a factually accurate summary for a change, in a world where so many reviewers resort to colourful analogies and metaphors.

      Icon chosen for same reason.

  8. Oliver Reed
    Pint

    The WOW . . .

    . . . stops Now

  9. AJ MacLeod

    Still haven't finished copying that file yet!

    I have hated MS products in general for several decades and they deserve virtually all the flak they get, but... I have always stood up for Vista when people start going on about how terrible it was.

    The experience of using it in the first year or so was indeed pretty terrible, but it mostly wasn't actually Microsoft's fault for once - it's just a pity it took the rest of the industry until 7 was released to finally begin to catch up with sorting out their dire drivers and badly written, run-as-root applications (of course the more thousands of pounds you've paid for your essential business software, the more likely that they STILL haven't sorted that out!)

    The only real bug that was a regular major pain and definitely was MS' fault was the ridiculous file copying bug where a simple copy operation would stick forever, claiming hundreds of days remaining!

  10. Dave K

    Mixed opinions

    There were a few issues with Vista. Not least of which is that it was too bloated for the PCs of the time. When Vista came along, PCs typically only had 2GB of RAM, sometimes only 1GB, plus they often only had single core CPUs. And Vista crawled along on such systems, compared with XP that ran pretty quick on the same hardware. Hence Vista gained a reputation for being slow.

    Windows 7 is a similar size, but by the time it was released, 4GB was the norm, as were dual/quad core CPUs. Hence on the PCs of the time, Windows 7 ran pretty well and automatically gained a reputation of being quicker. Run Windows 7 on a single core system with 1-2GB of RAM and it'll also run sluggishly.

    UAC was a good idea, but was quite annoying and popped up a bit too often. Windows 7 fixed this simply by toning down the prompts to areas where they were necessary. Of course, XP-style apps that expected admin rights and full write access to the whole hard drive definitely helped exacerbate the problem.

    Lastly IMO, the main other issue of Vista was that it felt messy. 7 different shutdown options (with Sleep as the default - even on laptops). A default wallpaper that was a smorgasbord of too many colours, the side-bar that didn't do that much but which added more clutter. Windows 7 in comparison did a good job of streamlining and tidying the UI up.

    Overall, I didn't personally like Vista. It was a bit too bloated for hardware of the time, the UI was messy, and it didn't offer much to the end user over XP, whereas Windows 7 introduced the new task bar, the ability to snap windows side-by-side, plus other genuinely useful tweaks.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh alright...

    Since all you soppy bastards missed it, ill say it.

    Hasta la Vista.

    1. LionelB Silver badge

      Re: Oh alright...

      Hasta la Vista

      You do realise that that translates roughly as "until we meet again"?

      Eek.

  12. W.O.Frobozz

    Pfft.

    Windows 2000 was the last GOOD version of Windows. It's been downhill ever since.

    But on the plus side, Windows Vista's greatest contribution to the world of computing is it's enormous hunger for resources finally pushed us all into the 64-bit era.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    POS from the get-go

    I got a new HP laptop at work (college where I lectured) in summer 2007 with Vista pre-installed.

    Would not see a USB mouse at all, even when rebooted with the mouse already connected. In 2007??????

    Other thing: I always intended to put linux on but thought, as Vista was the first version of windows to allow for resizing a partition, that I'd dual boot in case I wanted to show my students anything under windows.

    So, fire up the resize tool and use its "calculate minimum size required" feature.

    Plug that number into the resize only to be told that it is too small.

    Two strikes and Vista was off that machine for ever.

    And that was the last time anything MS was allowed anywhere near any computer in my control.

  14. theotherguy

    The worst thing about Vista was...

    All the laptops and desktop boxes with the badge saying it is Vista Ready. That was a train wreck.

    1. GrumpyKiwi

      Re: The worst thing about Vista was...

      Yeah. Got into a shouting match with the sales spods at work at the time as they relentlessly tried to push onto clients Vista machines with 256MB or 512MB of RAM that ran like a snail on valium.

      Got the rest of the engineers to buy in and we refused to install anything with specs that crappy - hence all the shouting about "it meets the minimum spec" and "customers don't want to pay for extra memory or performance" vs. "customers don't want to wait 10 minutes after startup before they can run notepad" and "you charge an hour for setup per laptop when these crappy things take four+ just to copy over old data".

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    1% market share?

    More than Windows Phone 10

  16. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This wasn't fair

    Vista deserved to be terminated (or rather a mercy killing) well before this.

    I never understood why many machines that came precrippled with Vista couldnt be upgraded to 10, when the *exact same* hardware would run 7 x64 just fine.

    I actually upgraded the CPU on mine, laptop eventually failed but had a BIOS chip been obtainable it likely would still work now.

    Still have a Dimension 3000 somewhere which will (barely!) run Vista but is hobbled by no SSL2 support.

    Its a BIOS limitation, the instructions are there but can't be accessed.

  18. J. Cook Silver badge
    Mushroom

    UAC...

    UAC on windows 7 I can live with; even on 8.1 it's at a decent balance between a sanity check and annoyance. Vista was a 'meh' start out of the gate. (which is why most enterprises stayed the hell away from it and implemented windows 7.)

    Server 2012 R2 (especially one configured as a file server): Worst. Idea. EVER.

    In order to manage file permissions on a server 2012 R2 file server, I have to either go through the share interface on a client machine, OR run powershell on the console as an Administrator and try to remember the (obtuse and obscure) syntax to change the ACLs via command-line, OR I have to crank up task manager and launch an instance of File Manager As Administrator.

    ON. THE. CONSOLE. OF. THE. MACHINE.

    This gets absolutely stupid when you are dealing with several million files occupying 5+ TB of space, because the business users are packrats.

    And don't get me started on managing permissions on the root of the drive- that way lies madness and excessive foaming around the mouth.

  19. Franklin

    Still going strong...

    ...in the movie theatre near where I live, whose POS systems and ticket self-serve kiosks all run Vista.

    Well, I say "going strong." That's not really quite true. They both crash often, which is how I know they're running Vista.

    An end-of-life operating system that connects to a credit card reader. What could possibly go wrong?

  20. Big_Boomer Silver badge

    2012 kak

    Vista was flaky but was only ever aimed at personal users. 2012 on the other hand has all kinds of problems including the Large Send Offload issues and having a pointless GUI. When are MS gonna understand that pretty much NOBODY wants their tiles. May work on phones and tablets, pointless and irritating on PCs, utterly stupid and obstructive on servers.

  21. Mary_Vista

    Very rude

    I'm not obsessed with Windows Vista, I'm not even a fan of it. Itis a very buggy OS, which wasn't famous at all. The problem is that you made some very mean jokes about Vista's death. I don't want you to make a tribute or say some good stuff about Vista, since we're all allowed to share our opinions about certain things. Whatever, as an Windows Vista user, I felt very hurt because of reading your article. Maybe I can't upgrade to a better OS, because my computer is too weak, but do you care? NOPE. Thank you for telling me that I'll probably be hacked in a very short amount of time. You made me "very happy" -_-

  22. Roger Mew

    It was and still is the most stable platform that I had.

    It was and still is the most stable platform that I had, reliable and never let me down. I have been forced to upgrade to 7 as I had a copy unused so far so good, and it seems faster than the Vista. But frankly it was not bad and I am sorry that MS gave me all the problems with updates at the end and the last 3 months.

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