Wow Windows Vista

Wow Windows Vista

Attached: wowvista.jpg (1024x768, 171K)

In mid-July, representatives of Microsoft traveled to San Francisco in search of people who hated Windows Vista. The company recruited 140 Mac and PC users who thought Microsoft’s latest operating system was slow, that it crashed constantly, that it was incompatible with various devices, and that installing it would be a pain. None of these people had ever used Vista; they’d only heard from others that it sucked. When they were asked to watch a short demonstration of a brand-new Microsoft operating system called Windows Mojave, the Vista-haters were blown away. The new OS was quick and pretty, it handled photos and videos and music with aplomb, and it never crashed. “Why didn’t you guys release this instead of that Vista crap?” many wondered.

But that was the trick. Windows “Mojave” was really Windows Vista. Microsoft filmed the focus-group sessions using hidden cameras, and when the company rep dropped the news to the Vista haters, many were pleasantly surprised. “I had no idea that you could do all this with Windows Vista!” was a typical reaction. The company has since posted the videos online as part of a new ad campaign dubbed “the Mojave Experiment” (the ads are running here at Slate). But the experiment is a strangely passive-aggressive way to sell software. “You were wrong—Vista totally doesn’t suck as much as you thought!” is hardly a reason to pick up a new OS.

The problem was Vista had high RAM requirments for the time. So people trying to run them on their first release of XP machines were obviously going to have issues. And because of those people having that issue. A huge over exaggerated stigma grew around Vista.

It would be quite lovely if you would link to some articles, preferrably in archive form, that supports this.

It was also shit in weird other ways but this was the one I remember.

Here's the thing though, Microsoft knew what the average PC market was in those days. There's trying to place an upward pressure on consumers to buy more RAM but then there's just making something that's memory inefficient given average user resources.

I mean shit didn't Dell and I wana say HP at the time sell "Windows Vista Ready" desktops that still had insufficient RAM? What a crap way to handle first user experiences.

That and a bunch of machines were labeled "ready for vista" or whatever but were actually not really good enough to handle the system, and chugged as a result.

The fact that Windows Vista was a good OS is one of the only things me and my wife seem to be able to agree on of late.

"Vista Capable" I think.

its exactly like it is now, those companies were trying to hock off their obsolete hardware to people who didn't know any better, but the difference was waaay more obvious in the jump to vista because it legitimately did have higher requirements.

if you were buying a desktop computer at the time you were most likely fine, it was absolutely awful in the laptop market where you had devices with low tier celerons and 1gb of ddr2 ram trying to run vista

there were also the driver problems and how a fuckton of shit broke or flat-out didn't work with vista. Especially nvidia cards.