Almost three years to the day of its debut, Windows Vista is shunted off the stage to make way for Windows 7. What won’t you miss about the much-maligned OS?
“From today, when we say Windows we’re talking about Windows 7” proclaimed Jeff Putt, Windows Consumer Lead for Microsoft Australia, as he kicked off last week’s launch of Windows 7.
Seeming relieved to have the Vista era behind him at last, it was the first of several light-hearted and well-received japes which Putt made at the OS.
Features such as the live thumbnails of application windows which sprout from the revamped taskbar, with the ability to bring one window full-size onto the desktop while the others fade away, were welcomed as “Aero made useful”.
And even after previews of the light-hearted Windows 7 TV commercials, Putt exclaimed “This is the first time people are laughing in the right places at a Microsoft ad!”.
In just about every way imaginable Windows 7 has allowed Microsoft to almost press the ‘undo’ button on the past three years since the code for Windows Vista was signed off on November 8th, 2006.
Almost everyone in the tech industry knows the horror story of Vista’s near-tragic tableau. The OS that began with the loftiest of ambitions had its very foundations slowly pulled from under it, key features removed and milestone dates missed until the release date itself became a moving target.
Over five years after the arrival of Windows XP, which became the most successful version of Windows – so much so that Vista was hard-pressed to displace it, and Microsoft had a hard time killing it – Vista touched down in early 2007 to criticism from almost every quarter.
It was slow and cumbersome, ill-mannered and temperamental. It put eye-candy ahead of functionality, and nagged users in the guise of protecting them. It turned a simple Control Panel into a confusing maze-like morass of icons and links, and made simple tasks like joining a wireless network into a multi-click process.
Microsoft itself wasn’t to blame for the appalling lack of suitable drivers for hardware, but that didn’t win them any love from upgrading XP users seeking to upgrade.
Nor did Vista’s over-the-top hardware requirements, which raced too far ahead of where most XP-class system were – unlike Windows 7, which will run smoothly on almost any Vista PC from desktop to laptop to netbook.
Factory-fresh PCs which shipped with a Vista-class driver for every device had the best chance of showing Vista in its best light, but could not hide the operating system’s own inbuilt flaws.
Vista took a much-needed step forward with Service Pack 1, released a year later, but by then the damage was more than done. Only Windows fanboys could seriously proclaim Windows Vista as Microsoft’s best effort.
But that’s all in the past now. The question we have for APC readers, in the wake of Windows 7’s arrival, is what won’t
you miss about Vista?