Windows Vista - First and last complete Windows release
I still remember 2004. I was in middle school, and a friend of mine brought the latest edition of "World of Computers" magazine. It included an article about Microsoft's new Windows version, Windows Vista. Excitement was in the air. It looked so much different than XP. It looked to sleek with it's dark task bar, black and white start menu, start orb that was ever so slightly protruding from the task bar itself, and, of course, transparent windows. Even the sidebar looked so cool! We couldn't wait to try it out.
Soon enough, Vista Transformation Packs started to appear, and we just had to try them. Some of them were almost perfect, others were inspired by Vista's look and feel, and all of them were so much fun to try out. Mind you, these were the days before broadband was present in our lives, so we were sharing them using our USB sticks.
During this period, I had an old AMD Athlon 64 system, with 256MB of RAM. I just got an upgrade to nVidia 7600GT, and this upgrade made me realize how unstable my XP installation was. Whenever I would start a game, my PC would just BSOD. This wouldn't happen on my previous ATI GPU, and would not happen on Windows 2000, which meant, it had something to do with the GPU and the OS combination. I spent the next 2 years trying my best to get XP to work, but no dice. Eventually I switched back to Windows 2000, and was quite happy with it.
Despite this small setback, the excitement was there for the future release. As the release drew close, the promotional material and the ads in the magazines and PC parts shops started to appear more and more. And this time around, things were different. With previous Windows versions, sure, there were ads and everything, but you could see them only here and there. Every other PC parts shop maybe had a poster ad or something stuck to a door or something, but with Vista, they even had open signs, booklets, posters, monitors running ads, the complete works.
Eventually, system requirements dropped. While my friends accepted their disappointment with only being able to run Home Basic edition, without all the nice visual effects, for me, this was not acceptable. I had to get Home Premium to run, which meant a RAM upgrade at the very least.
The day came, someone got their hands on the ISO and a patch to bypass Windows activation, and all my friends came over to get it set up on my PC. At the end of the night, it was a bit disappointing. The PC laid open on my floor, Windows activation patch kept failing for some reason, about half of the devices I had failed in getting their drivers to work, and the whole system was just so slow compared to previous versions. But despite everything I truly liked it. The next day I tried running games, and lo and behold, they ran without any issues. A bit worse, but no crashes.
Exploring the OS, I noticed something. Almost all of the bundled Windows apps, some of which weren't updated for YEARS since they were initially released before Vista, had a new version. Windows Remote Desktop, for example, had a new look to match the new design. Same with Fax and Scan, Windows Mail, and so on. Even the installer got a new look. It felt like Microsoft went all in with this look, which made it feel complete. Even quite a few of the old icons were updated. I remember looking for an icon in the style of the old Windows 9x versions, which, up 'till that point, was always present, only to find it updated to match the new style. It felt like people who made it cared, despite it's awful development cycle. I even spent quite a bit of time trying to get third party apps, like Firefox or Winamp, to have a matching look. That's how much I appeciated the effort that was put into Aero.
Now, at the time, NOBODY had a legal Windows copy. Piracy was just how things worked here. You didn't just get a PlayStation, you would always make sure if the shop was selling it "chipped" (meaning that it had a modchip installed). Legitimate software stores just didn't exist. So when Vista came out, for the first couple of months, patches didn't work properly. I tried quite a few, but would always end up running the default 3 day trial. Luckily, my birthday was drawing close, and I was just so done. I started asking around and found a couple of stores actually offering to sell me a legal Vista copy. Quite a few were WAY overpriced. Like, several-times-the-price overpriced. Eventually, I found one that was selling it for just over the international, official, sticker price. So I got my parents to buy me a copy. It wasn't the full retail version either. It was an OEM copy, that came in a bland, white DVD case, in a plain white cardboard sleeve, instead of one of those cool cases retail copies came in. (Fun fact: The store chain I got it from ended up failing, and my first workpace was actually run by one of the owners of that store chain)
Everyone made fun of me for getting a legal copy. They thought I wasted my money, and at the time, I, kind of, felt guilty. But all these years later, I couldn't be happier to still have that copy on my shelf.
As you might already know, Vista ended up being hated for it's bad performance and unnecessary fluff. At the time I realized that I should just keep quiet about my experience. For me, it ran better than XP, it felt more complete, and just nicer to use. I understand that the average Joe didn't have a PC powerfull enough to run it, which made it feel worse than it was. Not to mention the laptops that were sold at the time, could barely run XP, let alone Vista. So, when combined, it made people hate it right out of the gate.
Some years later, Windows 7 was announced, and first beta versions dropped. I gave it a try, but it just felt like Vista, but not really. It was missing it's soul. Sidebar was removed, task bar became "Super bar" which was just confusing since it would group all app windows together into a single button, and worst of all, the Vista look and feel was still there. Colours were removed in favor of a bluish-white, but even that wasn't completely done properly. Often I would encounter an app with the old colour look that Vista had (dark or coloured toolbar, instead of the new light variant). It felt like a cheap attempt at doing the same thing again, just different for the sake of being different.
From this point on, new Windows versions felt like a bad hangover. No ads, no promotional material, not even "We're open" signs. Even today, I still see old Vista, or even XP material in parts shops. But no 7 or newer. Looking back at everything, Vista made me realize how incomplete everything was. Windows was an ugly amalgam of things trying their best to stay together and act as a whole. You can see it even today with Windows 11. Even the installer stayed the same. They would only change the background to "match" the new version. And around Windows 8 (I think), they even dropped the background image, and went with the lazy single colour instead, making everything look even cheaper. The only respite from this patchwork we call Microsoft Windows, for me, was when I switched to Ubuntu 7.04 for a bit. It felt fresh and cohesive, something I missed so much at that point.
Thinking about this memory makes me realize how much our approach to things have changed. It feels like we focus so much more on "Is this good enough?" instead of "Does it feel complete now?". For a while, while working as a Software Developer, I would often get in conflicts with my superiors because of my attention to details. I would not mark something as "done" if I noticed it was off by a pixel. For me, that was sloppy work. Even now, I might be slow on my delivery, but quite often that's due to wanting to do something properly. I can only hope that people will stop with this "good enough" nonsense. I guarantee you, from openly speaking with quite a few people in the PC industry, quite a bit of them want to do good work, but are stiffled and hurried to deliver whatever, and that is one of the major causes of burnout in my opinion.