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A New Look At Windows Vista, Part I

September 7, 2010

We all have an opinion about the release of Windows Vista; just like Dirty Harry said, “they are like…” well, you already know, “everyone has one.” Now that Windows 7 has been released – and there are very positive reviews on that operating system (OS) – we may as well take a realistic look back at Vista and what it became once it reached its final stage with Service Pack 2 installed.

From the first impressions of Vista we all heard that it was very large and needed some incredibly modern hardware on which to run. Most people suggested staying with Windows XP as it was, “the greatest OS Microsoft ever produced.” There are some good arguments about this due to Windows XP being an extraordinarily stable and easy OS to use. Windows XP does not crash near as often as say Windows ME, which really was a non-starter as a business OS as it was not very flexible and certainly not stable. So, after researching Windows Vista – even installing it and running tests with it – many people kept their Windows XP licenses and did not upgrade. Even Microsoft realized that they would lose many thousands of customers if they did not continue to support Windows XP, so they continued to do so while Vista was available and they were working on Windows 7.

One way to get a grip on how bad Windows Vista really was is to compare it to its previous and subsequent versions. This should help to dispel any opinions and get closer to fact, though the exercise will honestly only produce a well-informed opinion based on facts. First up is to look at how Windows XP stacked up against Windows Vista.

Figuring out how long Windows XP was being sold by Microsoft can be a challenge, but there is some help, thankfully, on the Web. MS released Windows XP near the end of October 2001; they stopped selling it at the end of June 2008. That works out to around six years and eight months or so – plus or minus a few days. That is a long time by OS standards, a very long time. Of course, when Windows XP was first released and used, it was receiving complaints from around the world about its lack of stability and its problems with installation, compatibility, and the hardware needed to run it. It was nearly a year later that MS released Windows XP Service Pack 1 and they called it a huge cumulative update which drastically improved the XP experience. At that time, they couldn’t have been more wrong! If you do not remember the problems reported, just go and look it up; there are thousands of articles available on the subject. This is why Service Pack 1a was released shortly thereafter. This put Windows XP in a slightly better position.

But, it was nowhere near perfect as reports of serious virus and worm problems started to appear. People were losing their entire systems to attacks from malevolent programmers the world over. In the light of this, MS started work on Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. It was touted as a solution and a huge security update was included with it in order to bring back sanity to users everywhere. The enhanced Windows Firewall was part of SP2 and it was turned on by default when you installed it. The problems from this were almost legendary; applications started to not work anymore, surfing the Internet was problematic and even home networks stopped functioning properly.

Finally, in May of 2008, MS gave us Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. During the time between SP2 and SP3, Microsoft had worked out many of the causes of the Microsoft Firewall problem and other issues with the OS. They had solved many bugs and fixed them properly with Service Pack 3. Windows XP had become the loveable and stable OS which we are now all used to working within. It had taken some four years to solve the problems which had come along with the introduction of Windows XP. It seems that many forget this long time between flakiness and stability. (Not all of us did, though, as many were still running Windows 2000 until Windows XP was ‘fixed’.)

What this should demonstrate to you is that even Windows XP was not perfect when first placed before the public – it had its problems like every other OS ever released by Microsoft (or anyone else, for that matter). It took time to get the updates completed and released so that everyone using Windows XP would benefit. Simply writing Windows Vista off as a poor OS and moving on would be very unfair to the OS and what was accomplished by its release.

In the next part, we will compare Windows Vista and the new Windows 7, so make sure to read up on that and get the conclusion to this story.

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