Yeah, XP did that with most of the drivers other than graphics, which lead to a reduction in BSOD crashes (because if a user thread crashes, the OS just kills it and continues on, but an unhandled kernel error will crash the entire OS to a generic “turn the screen blue, report and error, and log it, if possible”).
Vista further improved this by moving most of the graphics driver code out of kernel land.
I sort of agree with you, but not in the way I think you meant it.
Vista’s problem was that it’s hardware requirements were too high for it’s time. Operating systems have very long project development lifecycle and at a point early on they did a forward looking estimate of where the PC market would be by the time Vista released, and they overshot. When it was almost ready to release it to the world Microsoft put out the initial minimum and recommended specs and PC sellers (Dell, HP, Gateway) lobbied them to lower the numbers; the cost of a PC that met the recommended specs was just too high for the existing PC market and it would kill their sales numbers if they started selling PCs that met those figures. Microsoft complied and lowered the specs, but didn’t actually change the operating system in any meaningful way - they just changed a few numbers on a piece of paper and added some configurations that let you disable some of the more hardware intensive bits. The result was that most Vista users were running it on hardware that wasn’t actually able to run it properly, which lead to horrible user experiences. Anyone that bought a high end PC or built one themselves and ran Vista on that, however, seemed quite happy with the operating system.
Vistas problem was that it was ahead of its time
I both agree and disagree with that statement.
Windows finally got animations and transparency when Mac OS has beaten it by 6 years. Truly an oomph moment.
The actual technological advancement of Vista was userspace graphics drivers.
Yeah, XP did that with most of the drivers other than graphics, which lead to a reduction in BSOD crashes (because if a user thread crashes, the OS just kills it and continues on, but an unhandled kernel error will crash the entire OS to a generic “turn the screen blue, report and error, and log it, if possible”).
Vista further improved this by moving most of the graphics driver code out of kernel land.
Also correct.
I sort of agree with you, but not in the way I think you meant it.
Vista’s problem was that it’s hardware requirements were too high for it’s time. Operating systems have very long project development lifecycle and at a point early on they did a forward looking estimate of where the PC market would be by the time Vista released, and they overshot. When it was almost ready to release it to the world Microsoft put out the initial minimum and recommended specs and PC sellers (Dell, HP, Gateway) lobbied them to lower the numbers; the cost of a PC that met the recommended specs was just too high for the existing PC market and it would kill their sales numbers if they started selling PCs that met those figures. Microsoft complied and lowered the specs, but didn’t actually change the operating system in any meaningful way - they just changed a few numbers on a piece of paper and added some configurations that let you disable some of the more hardware intensive bits. The result was that most Vista users were running it on hardware that wasn’t actually able to run it properly, which lead to horrible user experiences. Anyone that bought a high end PC or built one themselves and ran Vista on that, however, seemed quite happy with the operating system.