What things do you love and hate about Windows Vista and higher?

(Yep, literally the same Windows thread. Will attempt to focus on Doom more later on.)

To be honest, I don't think I will keep on talking about the flaws about Windows Vista and later.

So for the things that I love on Windows Vista and later:

• New D3D1X API for gaming
• New WDDM driver model, also for gaming
• Windows Media Player 11, 12
• Kernel improvements.
• Improved video performance.

What I hate:

• Fucked up MIDI.
• Inability to play Visual Basic DX7 and DX8 games.
• Disk space bloat up whenever installing updates.
• Turning USB equipments off through Safely Remove Hardware won't turn off their indicator lights, giving impression that it is still unsafe to remove it.
• Requiring to backup every single thing on a drive. I mean, do you have to backup every single thing of that harddrive instead of a folder? 

Anything else you love and hate?

Edit: What mistakes did MS did in Windows?

Oh how I miss you so

Good ol' Win95 and Win98 startup sound.

Holy pieces of cow (yeah this is a reference to something), another Windows thread. Ooooooh boi.

Yeah, I really think we've got enough of 'em.

Also, about liking stuff, as cool as Windows Media Player might have been at the time of Vista, it's pretty much obsolete these days since we now have VLC, BSPlayer, Winamp (for music), and in general more, and better players out there. Originally you could not view gifs in the built in Windows app either, this came only much, much later, or, well, you could, but the animation doesn't play. This was one of the less significant annoyances of the old OSes.

While not related to functionality, the design has gotten crappier and the interface is more messier overall. And W10 also has both IE and Edge for no good reason as well. IE is barely used anymore so it's just pointless, especially since Edge was supposed to be its replacement. But by far, the poor design and mess they started doing since 8.1.

Also, I wish they'd fix their Windows Store app so that it stops crashing while starting sometimes, and the background apps settings to actually do something, but Store and Photos seem to love opening by themselves whenever they're in the mood.

1. Windows vista did not have a zip extractor from the get go.
2. you could not view animated gifs from the default picture viewer.
3. You could not do a manual defrag, if you do you will regret it.

8 hours ago, Cacodemon345 said:

• Inability to play Visual Basic DX7 and DX8 games.

Works for me. You might have to manually register the dx7vb.dll or dx8vb.dll. You must run this, in the DOS console as administrator:

regsvr32 D:\Path-to-dll\dx7vb.dll

That causes the .dll to make an entry in the Windows Registry which the game needs to run. You might also need to copy the .dll to the game folder first, and then use that path in the regsvr32 command-line.

Finally, you might need to do the Windows compatibility mode deal, and set it up to run the game in Windows XP compatibility.

What do I hate the most about Vista and beyond? The shell - explorer.exe. Every version, they feel the need to move everything around, rename it, remove it, or embed functionality into something else. I'm all for progress, but all the rearranging is annoying.

Windows used to be concerned with consistency. Every window had common elements: The titlebar looked and worked the same in all programs. Underneath, there was often a toolbar, with New File, Open File, Save File as the first three buttons. The menus were similar. Even the order of menu items was similar: File Edit View Tools Window Help.

But, starting with Windows 8, there are now little hidden slide-out windows and menus on the side of the desktop, reskinned buttons and scrollbars - I can barely navigate it. The GUI should be obvious, and stay in the background so you can focus on what you're trying to do with your computer. Now, you have to stumble upon and discover how to navigate the programs. It's confusing, and ugly, and a definite step backwards for usability. It doesn't even look good, IMHO. I find it frustrating.

The worst thing is that they provide no way to go back to a standard look and feel, which, to me is borderline irresponsible. The number of man hours of productivity lost must be astronomical.

I'm pretty happy with 8.1

Reasonable functionality for burning optical discs and mounting images

MS stopped developing and trying to shove Media Player down our throats

MS stopped developing and trying to shove Explorer down our throats (I can't speak for Edge in 10 as I will never use 10)

What things do I lhate about Windows?

Hmm... Microsoft.

The windows store, and obligatory updates that eat bandwith like a hungry dog, luckily both can be turned off with hacky ways.

I hate Cortana and the new Windows store/menu. No I don't wanna see Trump's face when I'm just trying to open something (i know I can move those things but I had a Windows phone once upon a time so I'm familiar with what they're going for.)

Win7 will always be the best.

7 hours ago, Agent6 said:

Holy pieces of cow (yeah this is a reference to something), another Windows thread. Ooooooh boi.

 

Yeah, I really think we've got enough of 'em.

I said already that I will try to focus on Doom more later on.

Love: It's not OS X, it's not Windows ME

Hate: It's closed source, it's still Windows

5 hours ago, kb1 said:

The worst thing is that they provide no way to go back to a standard look and feel, which, to me is borderline irresponsible. The number of man hours of productivity lost must be astronomical.

Which also bothers me. The Windows Classic theme would keep standard look and feel.

11 minutes ago, YukiRaven said:

Love: It's not OS X, it's not Windows ME

 

Hate: It's closed source, it's still Windows

Glad it is not macOS which is too closed source and also not Windows ME which is one of the worst releases ever and buggy as hell.

But it is still Windows.

Another thing that I hate about Windows Vista and later is that the user interface is more crappier than before.

Windows 7 Pro used to be my fan-favourite!!

The windows store can die in a fire. Most other things aren't as annoying (unless it is Vista, fuck vista).

Vista wasn't actually so bad once it got its service packs to fix most of the original problems. In fact, Windows 7 is basically Vista SP3 with a rebranding to get rid of Vista's negative publicity. Now it certainly was annoying that they broke so much old stuff by changing their driver model, but it was a good thing to do from a security standpoint.

The biggest issues with the post-XP Windows systems are ill-designed UI changes (I still dislike the ribbons, and I hate flat square monochrome tiles) and MS's desire to emulate Apple and go full walled garden, with app stores and stuff.

2 hours ago, Gez said:

Vista wasn't actually so bad once it got its service packs to fix most of the original problems. In fact, Windows 7 is basically Vista SP3 with a rebranding to get rid of Vista's negative publicity. Now it certainly was annoying that they broke so much old stuff by changing their driver model, but it was a good thing to do from a security standpoint.

Eh, from my experience even with all the Service Packs it was still slower than 7 and more unstable. It was the only Windows OS I ever used where updates would sometimes just love failing to install and then get stuck in an endless reboot loop, or the OS itself would just break suddenly by hanging and never recover. It was bullshit at release and as much as they tried fixing it, 7 is pretty much what it was supposed to be.

good:

e v e r y t h i n g

bad:

n o t h i n g

1 hour ago, Agent6 said:

Eh, from my experience even with all the Service Packs it was still slower than 7 and more unstable. It was the only Windows OS I ever used where updates would sometimes just love failing to install and then get stuck in an endless reboot loop, or the OS itself would just break suddenly by starting to hang and never recover. It was bullshit at release and as much as they tried fixing it, 7 is pretty much what it was supposed to be.

I used Windows Vista for a while. It was quite short-lived experience. It was slow as hell.

I attempted to install Service Pack 2. It was unstable and caused it to invalidate Windows trial period, forcing me to switch back to Windows 7.

Windows 7 is basically Vista SP3 or Windows Vista Good Edition.

Windows 7 is typically better than Vista. So, fuck Vista.

However, Microsoft made ill-designed UI changes in Windows 8 and higher. The removal of Aero Glass is a very bad decision for me. It made Windows beautiful.

In fact, Windows 10 contains blocky UI elements and colors which is crappier than any Windows version released before it.

Sad thing is, Windows 8 was going to retain Aero Glass in a developer preview

2 hours ago, Gez said:

The biggest issues with the post-XP Windows systems are ill-designed UI changes (I still dislike the ribbons, and I hate flat square monochrome tiles) and MS's desire to emulate Apple and go full walled garden, with app stores and stuff.

The Ribbons element were derived from Office 2007's Fluent UI, along with it's Office button menu element.

I can't switch back to Win7 as my new computer lacks some driver support for it. The manufacturers already went with some of it's drivers only supporting Win8 and higher.

4 hours ago, TFK said:

Windows 7 Pro used to be my fan-favourite!!

Me too.

Seems like almost everyone on this thread is going for hate rather than love.

So, hate list:

• Inability to prevent a specific folder from being shared. In Windows XP you could hide other folders from being shared when sharing an entire folder.
• Inability to perform in-place repair reinstall. You have to reinstall literally everything and move data from moved Users.old folder.
• No accurate display of Windows Update download.
• Single-colored title bar in Windows 10. In Windows Classic, you are able to specify custom gradients of title bar, impossible in Windows 8 and higher.
• Bloated memory and disk usage.
• High CPU requirements.
• Good ol' Win7 themes unavailable in Windows 8 and higher.
• As @dmg_64 said, obligatory Windows updates. Made worse in Windows 10's Creators update as it will still eat bandwidth even when using Metered network.
• Inability to disable Windows Store adverts through Group Policy in Windows 10 Home and Pro, done since Anniversary update. These things get in the way of using a computer. I didn't know M$ can go to this extent to keep their services safe.
• Design control where your computer is more important than you.
• No real output from Windows Defragmenter.
• Mass removal of features and mass backward-incompatible changes.
• Broken DirectDraw, luckily tools to combat this are available.
• No way to set up things in the old way.

1 hour ago, Cacodemon345 said:

• No real output from Windows Defragmenter
• Bloated memory and disk usage.

I've once read an article that says that MS makes their own tools work like ass intentionally so that developers would have the incentive to Do It Better and make the software library richer. Think about it

Same applies to the bloat AFAIK -- so that programs like CCleaner is created

1 hour ago, Cacodemon345 said:

• High CPU requirements.

• Good ol' Win7 themes unavailable in Windows 8 and higher.

• No way to set up things in the old way.

• Broken DirectDraw, luckily tools to combat this are available

• Mass removal of features and mass backward-incompatible changes.

"When you chop wood, bits of it fly around" -- old Russian proverb, artificially translated by me. Think about it

1 hour ago, Cacodemon345 said:

• Inability to prevent a specific folder from being shared. In Windows XP you could hide other folders from being shared when sharing an entire folder.

I'm pretty sure there's an "don't share subfolders" option. Not sure though, I don't use the feature much.

1 hour ago, Cacodemon345 said:

• Design control where your computer is more important than you.

Elaborate

1 hour ago, Cacodemon345 said:

• As @dmg_64 said, obligatory Windows updates. Made worse in Windows 10's Creators update as it will still eat bandwidth even when using Metered network.

Alright point taken hahaha, that indeed sucks

8 hours ago, bzzrak said:

I'm pretty sure there's an "don't share subfolders" option. Not sure though, I don't use the feature much.

 

Elaborate

I didn't find "Don't share subfolders" option anywhere.

As for design control, in Windows XP and before, you were able to control your computer like an admin, which isn't true anymore in Windows Vista and higher. Some Windows Features require User account control enabled to be able to work.

As I said, mass removal of features done in Windows Vista. They already broke some more gaming stuff in Windows 8 by removing DirectDraw.

By your artificially translated proverb, I think you are referring to features that still stay around. The taskbar and traybar and Direct2D, XAudio are the only features to stay around with the latter two features as replacements of outdated technology.

To be fair, removal of little-used features would be better.

Also, how did Vista got that negative publicity?

One thing I noticed lately: Windows performs quite a bit worse than Linux on my setup when playing videos, streaming, or straight-up encoding.  Same software, same hardware... but Windows has sub par performance.

5 hours ago, YukiRaven said:

One thing I noticed lately: Windows performs quite a bit worse than Linux on my setup when playing videos, streaming, or straight-up encoding.  Same software, same hardware... but Windows has sub par performance.

It is all because of Windows being slow.

Trust me, it has become slow over time and with each and every release of Windows.

More shit from Microsoft: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/151578/new-windows-10-consumer-sku-roadmap-revealed

24 minutes ago, Cacodemon345 said:

More shit from Microsoft: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/151578/new-windows-10-consumer-sku-roadmap-revealed

Why is any of this a problem to you? Do you even understand what's going on there? Because nothing there could be even remotely offensive to anybody.

13 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

Why is any of this a problem to you? Do you even understand what's going on there? Because nothing there could be even remotely offensive to anybody.

Elaborate

I asked you to elaborate.

I don't want to pay more for the ability to run Win32 apps if I buy a Windows 10 Pro PC.

... Then good news because that's not happening? Re read that article again (or better yet don't because it's clearly not meant for you). You only need to pay money to upgrade from Windows 10 S, which you aren't buying because you aren't an education facility or related institution that needs to run an isolated Windows environment.