Your mileage with Vista was wildly hardware-dependent. Prior to Vista, if you could run one version of Windows, the next version would run just about as well.

The Indexer and Glass were memory hungry. If you gave it a decent amount of ram, it could look like a dream while it did. If you turned off Aero on an under-specced machine, it could also run pretty well, but if you turned off Aero, you didn't have much of a reason not to just run 98se.

The other shoe was drivers. Noone was ready for WDDM and a LOT of the small to mid-sized hardware vendors emergency released slow, buggy, memory-hungry drivers that just made Vista feel horrible.

I had some off-the-shelf compaqs that ran beautifully, My dual P3/scsi workstation with tons of ram, ran like hot garbage.

[–] Narauko@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

God, I almost trauma blocked the driver situation for that first year or three. My q6600 and 8gb of ram ran like greased lightning, and disabling Aero made it even more responsive than 98SE or XP. (I am a latency and user experience fluidity whore though, so sacrificing eye candy for performance was and still is A-OK with me). The Aero design language was still killer even with the bells and whistles turned off.

The main reason to jump from XP (or 98) was the 64 bit jump and breaking the 4gh ram limit. XP x64 was kinda hot garbage, also due to driver issues if I recall correctly.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

I was so sad to see aero go, especially that sexy 3d task swapper