Is Anyone Still Using Windows Vista?

I was reading an article recently about how Windows Vista accounts for less than 2% of all PCs running today and that 64-bit Vista accounts for only a fraction of that 2%.

And I started wondering how many people still use it.
From time to time, I still repair some Vista computers, but I usually advise the owners to upgrade.

So, who is still using this rare and often ridiculed operating system?

 

After all the patching, Vista is no longer a buggy OS. I like it in its present form. I have one installed as a Virtual OS.
Nevertheless, how anyone can forget that Vista brought all the eye-candy elegance in Windows, and at some time many of us madly wanted to use Vista transformation packs for XP just for its aesthetic beauty.

 

Currently I've got two mini desktop PCs running Vista, which I'm trying to sell. The PCs came with a whole lot of used PC parts I purchased cheaply recently. I'm selling them as I have no use for desktops. However, I actually like Vista. I find that if both service packs are installed it works nearly as well as Windows 7.

I've always liked Vista. While lots of people had issues with it, I installed in on my laptop when it was first released and it worked really well, and I can't recall having any significant issues. Later on, I came across some PCs where Vista ran slowly. But, in my exeprience, the performance issues could be fixed by installing both service packs. I have no idea why Vista with no service packs runs slowly on some computers and fine on others. A few years ago I purchased a cheap used Sony Vaio laptop from eBay, on which the recovery media had been used to reinstall the factory install of Vista. It initially ran well, but after a few weeks of use, and installing only a few programs, it started to have major issues. For example startup times would be very long, and Viata would freeze if I opened Internet Explorer before Windows had finished loading. I installed both service packs, and then it ran really well again.

 

Used daily. It prints my shipping labels and handles business emails. Vista has memory/pagefile issues that cause most of the slowdowns because it spends too much time swapping memory to the page file. It needs at least 2 gigabytes to really perform well and some tweaking of services helps. Superfetch is the worst offender and disabling it will improve performance quiet a bit.

Windows 7 is Vista service pack 3 essentially but Microsoft renamed it because of the stigma attached to Vista.

 

That's an interesting revelation.

 

Truly, I can't see substantial changes and innovations from XP to 10. It's the same OS with some addition, some aesthetic changes in icons and others minor graphic details, nothing that really attracts to upgrade from a Windows version to another except the end of the previous version. If not, why XP and 7 are again so widespread ?

 

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I still find Vista the most pleasant OS I've used, distros included.

 

I agree.

Vista was ahead of it's time when it comes to resource usage, but it was a revolution in the Widows world. More secure, prettier, with a ton of new features that made Vista more usable than XP.

I remember that there was an edition of XP, around 2007-2008, that came with the Vista style. I can't remember the name of it, but I remember my breathing went irregular every time I saw someone using it.

Exactly. Too bad Microsoft took too long to patch Vista's performance. And to make matters worse, there are a ton of regular users who never update, so I think there were a lot of people who liked Vista but didn't get the updates.

Exactly. Windows 7 is a "Better Vista". After Vista, no Microsoft OS had such a change, I guess, they all seem to be the previous product but with some changes that differentiate them.

If End Of Life is the only reason, then you can still use XP http://betanews.com/2014/05/26/how-...e-security-updates-for-windows-xp-until-2019/

 

I use it on my second most important machine. I think it is the most aesthetically oriented OS, and it works fine. I agree that it needs at least 2 GB of memory, but unfortunately there are signs that it will be dropped from being supported. Chrome keeps notifying that it will not update anymore on Vista.

 

Microsoft's extended support will finish on 11 April 2017.

 

I didn't mean MS Updates but Chrome for example.

 

I still have one client that is running Vista which I most often manage remotely. Instead of basing upgrade plans on Vista EOL (April 2017), I am strictly basing their upgrade plan on Chromium's EOL for Vista (April 2016). I value Chromium's updates slightly more so than I value Windows Updates, although both are important of course. So I will have to upgrade their memory (and possibly SSD) and move them onto Windows 7 prior to April 2016 when Chromium drops support for Vista.

 

Thank you, but now I'm using 7: I hope that really his core is better and safer than old XP, and anyway I have a 64-BIT machine now. What I miss is some nice customization pack for 7: with XP, I used this: http://www.crystalxp.net/galerie/en.id.130.htm.

 

I too miss customization for newer versions of Windows. I heard Microsoft made them really hard to make,but I'm not sure that's true.

Yes, 7 is more secure by default. But in the end, I think both can achieve a relatively good amount of security while having usability at the same time.

 

I also read so. If is, it's pathetic: Microsoft never had nor wanted to have the competence to make nice and customizable GUI, and would prevent other to do it ?! MS had to learn by LINUX world.

 

There are issues with Vista which means that quite often the install of SP1 or SP2 (which requires SP1 to be already installed) will fail. This means that a lot of people who did update their Vsita won't get SP1 or 2. This is usually easily fixed by downloading and running the System Update Readiness Tool for Vista. After which, the missing service packs should install.

 

An elderly relative of mine still runs Vista on an old x86 Toshiba laptop, she was initially distraught about the impending loss of Chrome, but has taken a liking to K-Meleon which she thinks loads pages faster.

I think Vista looked beautiful. But it had more bugs than a rain forest. My old notebook (which ran Vista for eight years) eventually borked itself into the Twilight Zone and I converted it to Ubuntu.

Still, the way I look at it, the borkfest disaster that was Vista paved the way for probably the best operating system MS ever developed; Win 7.

 

Talking about sluggish operating systems...
I still think that Windows 8 is the fastest in recent years.

Even with all the updates, I found Vista to still be sluggish.
But as one poster said, Vista would perform well on some computers, but not others.

 

Well, an OS has two basic kinds of performance:

• Visual performance, which is only related to the OS itself;
• And 3rd-party performance

Windows Aero might be sluggish on Vista, or it may feel less "snappy" as Windows 7/8/10. However, there are some areas where Vista is faster, for example a few games (like Crysis), at least in my case. Crysis 64-bit ran faster on Vista than on 7 for me.

 

20162 people using Vista....

R.I.P. never got any serious troubles with it, but the hype ... the hype always wins ...

 

Where did this number came from? Because AFAIK Vista has ~2% of the world usage, which is a lot more than 20k people.

 

LOL ....

 

my last computer came with Vista and when it got service pack 1 all the minor issues where solved. I got it before SP1 and a few stuff crashed like desktop gadgets etc. as always stated the issues with vista was mainly due to companies shipping computers with 512mb /1gb of ram +their own customer bloatware on top. I did upgrade to windows 7 on the same machine later on due the cheap pre order deal and the only difference i really felt was that windows 7 is faster. i also ran windows 8 on the same machine and windows 8 was even faster. I am surprised that google is ditching support for vista before microsoft do. i have had some issues with some of my customers computers running vista where by it will refuse to install service pack 2 regardless of what you do other than backup and format but that only seemed to be on Hp laptops.

 

@lodore Did you try running the System Update Readiness Tool? It's a common problem for SP2 or even SP1 to not install, but usually it will install after running this.

 

Hey Roger, I think I did. I still feel that it was a backwards step with vista having to install Sp1 and then SP2 rather than being able to install Sp2 directly on virgin vista.