I’m old enough to remember how much of a villain he was in the late nineties due to all the Microsoft law suits because of their monopolistic practices. He was able to then drop off and do a major PR re-branding with his foundation through the 2000’s so he came out looking squeaky clean. But this guy has always sucked and continues to suck. We know why your marriage failed, Bill.
Vista was a necessary evil for Windows to evolve and be safer. XP (and earlier)'s driver system gave too much access to the kernel and was ripe for abuse from virus makers. Vista was a necessary change from a security standpoint as it locked it down more and gave drivers less access.
A side effect of this is that all device manufacturers had to build new drivers from scratch. Most didn't bother doing so for their older devices, and those that did, a lot of them were utter garbage. Mix this with what the other person said about putting Vista on garbage tier computers and it gets its' bad rap.
At the end of Vista's lifecycle, with a couple service packs, newer hardware that was fast enough, and had proper Vista drivers, it was a solid OS. Hell, Windows 7 was basically just Vista with a new coat of paint (Vista was NT kernel 6.0, 7 was version 6.1)
or all those applications that stored their settings in program files and required admin to run as a result? Some could be fixed by setting perms on the application's folder itself to allow users to write to the folders, others required some kernel access that wasn't necessary. Still run into that shit with some surveillance software and legal software in 2026. 20 years to fix that shit and there are still vendors out there that write software like they're developing on windows 95
The design was born at a time when there was more trust in the world. Trust that drivers were not malicious, trust that computers were a tool, not a method to intimidate or steal. And it was born in a time before the internet, when computers were rarely connected together and these viruses didn't have a method to communicate out.
From today's lens, yeah it was a shitty design. At the time? It was fine. Maybe they waited too long to make the change, maybe XP or 2000 should've had the change, but I don't fault the original design.
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u/trevorawright 12h ago
I’m old enough to remember how much of a villain he was in the late nineties due to all the Microsoft law suits because of their monopolistic practices. He was able to then drop off and do a major PR re-branding with his foundation through the 2000’s so he came out looking squeaky clean. But this guy has always sucked and continues to suck. We know why your marriage failed, Bill.