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A New Look At Windows Vista, Part II

May 18, 2011

In our Part I we looked back at Windows XP and demonstrated just how much work it was for Microsoft to turn it into what we use today (in many cases, anyway). It is a very stable operating system (OS) when compared to other Microsoft offerings or to any other OS on the market. But, it took time for it to get there. Windows Vista has been panned since its release for being a cumbersome and unstable OS, but are we judging too harshly? Well, it has had its serious problems, but so did other OS releases until they were eventually fixed.

If you look at the time between the Windows Vista release and the release of Service Pack 1 for it, you will see that the duration is almost identical to that between the Windows XP release and its own SP1. However, the SP1 for Windows Vista was not the confusion and chaos of the Windows XP SP1 release and it was very obvious. The SP1 for Vista was received very warmly and installed immediately as it was to fix many initial issues with the OS.

Now, take a look at Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista; if you look at how long it took from the Windows XP street date to when SP2 was released for that OS, you will notice that Windows Vista’s SP2 came out about six months earlier. That is a significant margin and demonstrates how much more was being done much more quickly at Microsoft. At this point in the lifetime of Windows Vista, it is ahead of Windows XP and has become just as stable. Whether it has changed its image is a question for another time as that is a completely different argument.

Now we must start talking about the present in terms of Microsoft OSes. Let’s have a look at the Windows Vista successor, Windows 7, now and see how they compare.

One thing to keep close in your mind is that many experts point out that Windows 7 is actually more like a second release of Windows Vista. The two OSes are very similar and even work from essentially the same kernel. As you may already know, anything which works in Windows Vista will work in Windows 7. This is important to this discussion as Windows XP was a very different beast from Windows Vista, yet Windows 7 is extremely close to Vista.

So, from that, we can take Windows 7 as almost Windows Vista Service Pack 3 – in many ways, this proves to be true. However, there are many other ways where Windows 7 has departed from Windows Vista. If you come across a comparison document, you will see this very quickly. To us, for this argument at least, we can say that Windows 7 is in fact Windows Vista perfected. And, from the reviews pouring in on the subject, it would seem that Microsoft has released an OS which is stable and very useful right from the start. Or, we can say that Windows 7 is what Windows Vista should have been in the first place. Either statement is rather accurate given the data we have.

When looking back on Windows Vista when it was first available, we have seen that it was not very solid and needed some serious work to function properly. Also, though, we can say the same thing about the release of Windows XP. The two are forever connected as successive versions of the Windows OS. We have also seen where the updates to Windows Vista actually came much more quickly than for Windows XP. So, which of those two is the ‘worst’ OS? Honestly, now that Windows Vista has SP2, it looks like a virtual tie with a bit of a lean towards Windows Vista over Windows XP. It really is strange to think of it in this light. Now, is Windows 7 better than Windows Vista? Or, should the question really be moot since Windows 7 and Windows Vista are cut from the same cloth? For now, we can only speculate. But, one thing we have learned is that we have been a bit harsh on Windows Vista since we first used it. Think of it is a matter of perspective since there really can be no more than an opinion in the end.

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