Windows Vista will disappear from Microsoft’s list of supported software in just four weeks. As the successor to Windows XP, Vista promised a lot but delivered little.
Released just over ten years ago, this much maligned OS has survived for a while. To be honest, I’d almost consigned it to the same dark place in my memory as Windows ME.
Extended support ends on 11 April 2017.
Microsoft says “Windows Vista customers will no longer receive new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates” after the deadline.
Farewell Windows Vista.
[Via Microsoft]
Comments
4 responses to “Bye-Bye Windows Vista”
Vista doesn’t deserve to be compared to Windows ME. Vista’s main problems were lack of third party driver support because everyone dragged their feet on it, and overuse of the UAC prompt which was mainly caused by misbehaving software but which was blamed on the OS itself. If you had good hardware, well-behaved software and complete drivers it was fairly stable. It was far from perfect and Win7 was a big improvement but Vista’s biggest issue was really that all the people in tech tried to upgrade at release, hit all those initial teething issues, and wrote it off entirely, forever tarring its reputation. See also: Windows 8. ME meanwhile was an actual shitshow. Unstable nightmare of an operating system. And that was assuming you could get it to boot and stay running long enough to try and actually use it. There’s a lot of very good reasons why the Windows 9x kernel was retired in favor of NT.
All that said, Vista will not be missed. Thank god it’s nearly dead. It’s amazing to think it was still supported this long.
Vista had one major flaw – poor SMB performance.
Perhaps it was user error, but my NAS setup flew on XP and 7, and continues to on 10. Yet on Vista, even something as simple as fetching a file list took forever. Plenty of disgruntled forum posts on various tech sites and M$’s support pages shared similar experiences.
That said I never experienced driver issues personally and found that plug-n-play functionality was far superior vs even the reasonable service provided by XP.
I don’t think Vista was ever designed for SMB server usage. They intended most businesses to be installing Server 2003. Definitely wasn’t designed for use as a NAS, that’s definitely a case where Windows Server would have been the expected operating system.
Vista was not that bad and had the early signs of everything that made 7 great. Running commands and file/network paths directly from the start menu was great for an IT guy.
ME was the result of a failed attempt at Ballmer Peak.