Did we all just witness Windows start to die?

[stefcep2]

Microsoft has a bad habit of messing with what works. XP fixed the stability and usability problems of the Win95-WinME era, so they followed it with the travesty of Vista. Windows 7 cleaned up that mess, so they threw it away and gave us desktop Metro instead.

Why the Vista hate?

My first experience with it was with Vista Business SP1 on a 2 GB RAM netbook.  When I switched it on, it was horrible because the hard drive was indexing 20 GB of crapware files HP had installed.  I didn't know this, and cursed it.  And went to XP Pro.

A year later, the drive crashed and I did a fresh install of Vista business SP1.  Totally different experience.  Since then i have a PC desktop and laptop with Vista business and Win 7.  Other thna a longer boot time (10 seconds on average) Vista is great.

By Vista SP2 it ended up reliable, stable and compatible. And looks nicer.

I bet if I put a Win 7 theme most people would never know it was Vista underneath.

[stefcep2]

This sums it up nicely.

Yeah I can't agree that that's been my exact experience.

The hard drive grinding in Vista is due to a few things: the much better indexing and search service Vista has over XP; super fetch which over time learns to predict and pre-load things you mostly use; and system restore and defrag which are on by default.  I turn off super fetch, system restore and defrag.  And the sidebar-useless to me.

Explorer and multimedia issues?  I don't know what he's on about there-never had an issue with either.

File copy and delete issues, lack of drivers, graphics corruption, orphaned windows, poor reliability are all pre-SP1 issue, which I admit I never did use.

I read lots of similar negative reviews but not any that were post Vista SP1 or SP2.

I nearly upgraded all my 3 Vista SP2 systems to Win 7, until I got a work laptop with Win 7, and found other than the marginally quicker boot time, there was nothing else there that made the upgrade worth the money.

But whereas Vista's issues were performance, Win 8's are usability=Metro is innapropriate for a non-touchscreen environment.

[stefcep2]

I guess in their haste to make 'touch' a selling point (which the desktop still does badly) they figured Metro had to be front and center - and it's cost them a lot of credibility which is a shame because Windows 8 really is a good OS underneath the fluff.

What's underneath that makes it better?

I still haven't activated my copy, so maybe I'm missing something but the default desktop them looks like pants, and they've removed stuff (like they did when going from Vista to Win 7).

 All in all I felt I had one hand tied behind my back.

[stefcep2]

The code was optimised for speed and memory usage for running on tablets, but as it uses the same code then you get the same benefit.
 
The desktop looks the same to me, background picture + icons + task bar at the bottom. The start menu & Aero has gone, but I don't miss either of them. The only thing I'm a little disappointed about is they stopped supporting Virtual PC/XP Mode, but there are other free emulators. Windows 8.1 preview is nicer, but on the whole Windows 8 is perfectly usable.
 
I can't understand why anybody would downgrade to Windows 7. It would be like returning a Ferrari because you preferred the feel of the gear stick in your Ford.

Yeah I'm not convinced about the performance gains.  i suspect they've taken things  out that were there before in Win 7.  Tiny 7 does a lot of this and ends up lightning fast..

I mean Win7 Home had Mediacentre pre-installed which I know slows it down as I've removed it and Win 7 (and Vista) is faster without it.

Are there any real world tests on equally loaded set ups?