this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
276 points (94.2% liked)
Technology
59219 readers
3235 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
new versions of windows just kind of feel like new phones now. It's good but.. who cares?
I can remember as a teen and upgrading from windows 98 to XP felt like jumping into the future.
Or, more recently, getting the first samsung galaxy after having a basic candybar phone.
Just seems like more of the same all while charging an arm and a leg for it.
Then xp to vista happened and it looked pretty but was unusable. Then 7 came out and it solved all the BS and was a relief. Then 8 came out and it looked pretty but was unusable. Nobody is quite sure what happened with 9 but 10 was ok I guess, better than 8. Then I started using Linux because I was sick of the bullshit.
The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn't truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been "fixed." Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.
Vista's issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista's reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.
I was running an it services business at the time, so got to see a broad number of machines and peoples complaints.
I think the massive jump in ram required was a huge problem, it went from most people having 128mb to 256mb, to a minimum of 512, but a reality of 2gb required.
Plus the indexer was relentless and just smashed HDDs.
Drivers were a problem too but people understood they would need to be have upgrades for their fancy new system.
I'll second the issues with the indexer. I disabled it for every disk I had because the additional I/O load for disks was ridiculous. I remember benchmarking game launches with it enabled and disabled to see how much of a difference there would be, and I saw some games take a full minute less to load into a playable state.
I don't know if I just had more files than the average consumer or what, but they didn't anticipate the load under certain scenarios.