- Yes, that's right. I did the unthinkable. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another video. Now, in today's episode, we're gonna be unboxing and installing this brand new, never-opened copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. What's the occasion you ask? Well, last month was the 15th anniversary of Windows Vista's retail
release back in 2007. I know, who cares, right? I mean, this is one of the worst Windows versions of all time. Who wants to sit through a video about it? Well, evidently you do because you clicked on this one. So thank you so much for that. And speaking of the phrase thank you, Skillshare, I gotta thank them for sponsoring this video and for helping me purchase this because, even though Windows Vista
has a reputation it has, buying a brand new, never-opened copy is, you know, a little bit pricey. The other thing I wanna do in this video is really challenge your
perception of Windows Vista. I mean, yeah, we've been making
fun of it here in the intro, and that's just because
it's so easy to do. I mean, as we all know, Windows Vista was meant with
wide criticism when it launched and all of that tarnished the
public's perception of it. I mean, I guarantee, if you were to ask the average
computer user back in 2007 if they were gonna
upgrade to Windows Vista, they'd say something to the effect of, "Heck no, I'm not. I mean, everybody I know says it's terrible and it's got all these problems. I don't wanna upgrade to that. I'm gonna stick with XP." And that's exactly what happened. Windows Vista never surpassed
Windows XP in market share. So today I wanna talk about why that is, why Windows Vista failed or at least was perceived
as such a failure and is considered one of the worst Windows
versions of all time. I wanna take a step back and examine the criticism that it received now that we're on the other side of it, over 10 years after
Windows Vista launched, and talk about the reasons why it gained such a horrible reputation and the things that were quite frankly
completely exaggerated. So if you were out shopping
for Windows Vista in 2007, one of the first things you would notice is the newly designed packaging. I mean, putting this side
by side to Windows XP, you can see it is substantially different. No longer is there a cardboard box. This is made from plastic. It's smaller, it's sleeker. So opening this, the first thing we had to
do is tear this sticker or this piece of tape here rather on the right side. And so we're gonna tear that off very slowly but surely here. There we go, oh. Oh my gosh, guys. For the first time ever, here we go. And now we can pull this red tab. And there it is. For the first time, seeing it since it left the factory, Windows Vista Ultimate upgrade. So we're gonna go ahead and take out our documentation here. And we'll set the packaging aside for now and we'll see what we've got. So right here, we have a
before you begin pamphlet, and you also have the ability to kinda like what you had with Office 97. Certainly much older than Vista here, but Office 97 only came on a CD. But Microsoft allowed you
to request floppy diskettes. We've got the same thing going on here. If you needed CDs, you could request a CD
copy of Windows Vista, which was useful because,
well, if you didn't know, you needed to have a DVD drive, you were gonna kinda be outta luck until you filled this out. And here is the Windows Vista
Ultimate quick start guide, which is gonna take you
through every wonderful thing you would wanna know about Windows Vista. All the programs. I mean, look at this. Isn't this glorious, guys? Tells you what's new. It tells you what you need
to know to get it installed. I'm sure it's probably on the front here. Yep, upgrading or
installing Windows Vista, before you begin, all that good stuff. And of course, on the back, actually not on the back, where's the product key? (Michael laughs) Where is the, oh, it's on the back of the, yeah, it's on the back
of this thing right here. And speaking of the outer packaging, we can take a brief look at that here. So here you go. It tells you a little bit about some individual features here. Obviously, some of this would change depending on what addition
of this that you got. And speaking of additions,
on the back here, you've got a comparison chart for the four main
additions of Windows Vista, which we will definitely
be talking about later. But for now, let's go ahead and swap over to the trusty Dell Latitude D610, and we're gonna upgrade, upgrade in quotes, you'll see why in a minute, to this copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. All right, so here we are on
the trusty Dell Latitude D610. And the first thing you're
probably wondering is, "Michael, you clearly got an upgrade copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. Why on earth do you have
Windows 2000 installed? You can't upgrade from 2000 to Vista without XP in between." And you would be right. But I want to install Windows 2000 on here to illustrate one of the first criticisms with Windows Vista, and that is confusion. On this box right here, up at the top left, you see this little upgrade box, and it says, "For users running Microsoft
Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP, or Windows Vista only." So when I got this in the mail, I was saying to myself, "Well, wait a second. Can you upgrade from
Windows 2000 to Vista? I didn't think so. I thought you had to have XP." And it turns out that,
yes, that is the case. But this wording on here would lead you to believe,
if you were to read that, you would probably think, "Oh, I can upgrade from
Windows 2000 to Vista." Well, you can't. If we continue reading here it says, "Backup and clean install may be required. See back of box for details." So it turns out that you
were not able to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows Vista, but you were able to get the upgrade copy and qualify for the upgrade pricing. It's just not really well-worded. And sure enough, on the back here, it says at the bottom, you have to be running
Windows XP Service Pack 2. So we've got the disk in the drive and we are running Windows
2000 Service Pack 4, which is required to be able to launch
the Vista setup program from within Windows 2000. And there it is. And yeah, we don't have the proper graphics driver installed. So that's why we're running
in a low color mode here and at a lower resolution. And we will accept the license terms. And right here is where it tells you that, "Hey, even though you
bought an upgrade copy, you can't upgrade from Windows 2000. You have to do a clean install." So let's go ahead and
click on custom here. And we will choose our partition here. And right here, it's gonna let you know that because this partition contains files from a previous Windows install, it will move some of those
files to a Windows.old folder and store them in there. So this is where you kinda
get a like semi-upgrade because some of your
files will remain, right? It's not gonna delete everything, but it's not an in-place upgrade. It's not going directly
from 2000 to Windows Vista. This is still a clean install. But again, you know, that's a little confusing
for people, right? And speaking of confusing, let's get back to the
Windows Vista editions here. Because forget this whole
upgrade thing, right? Windows Vista had six editions. Four of which were
released here in the US. You had Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise. Now Starter, just like XP Starter, was only available in developing markets. And Enterprise was only
for, well, enterprise users. Even still with four
additions of Windows Vista, that is double what XP had. With Windows XP, you had
Home and Professional. Simple, basic, not confusing at all. If you're a home user, you bought Home. If you're a business user,
you bought professional. Well now with Windows Vista,
you had two Home editions. And so it's like what was
the difference between them? Well, the major difference was that Home Basic didn't have any of the fancy Aero visual effects that was reserved for
Home Premium and above. But it just made things
unnecessarily confusing. I know what Microsoft was trying to do. They were trying to kinda
have this entry level version of Vista that was more affordable, but they really could have
probably done without it and lowered the cost of Home Premium and certainly still turn to profit and in the process, not make things so confusing for people. Because, I mean, people who looked up this stuff and knew about Vista and had followed the
development and all that, they knew all this stuff, right? But the average computer user is not going to be as invested
in the Windows ecosystem. They're not gonna know all this stuff. So when they go to the Store, they're gonna see four
different copies of Vista and probably be pretty confused. In fact, the OEMs, the computer manufacturers, saw this as a potential problem. There's an email from Dell
that was sent to Microsoft sometime in 2005 before Vista even finished development, and they expressed concerns over having more than two SKUs of Windows. And so they saw the potential for it to create unnecessary confusion . And all of this wording by
Microsoft on the box here about "this is an upgrade, but it's not an upgrade" just adds to the confusion even more. And even on the back here
on this comparison chart, this fourth one down here says, "Best choice for laptops." Now, you would read that and think, "Oh, okay. Well, one of these is
gonna be the best choice for a laptop, right?" No, three of them are. Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate. They're all the best choice for laptops. That doesn't really help. I mean, you're just getting
rid of one of the versions. I mean, what's the best for laptops? Well, there really isn't. Honestly, that probably
shouldn't even be in that list. I think personally that if
Microsoft were to have gone with the two edition format
like they do with XP, Windows Vista would've had a marginally better
perception by consumers. The next set of criticisms
we're going to touch on have to do with advertisements
and expectations. But first, and I'm sure you
all were expecting this, I need to take a moment to advertise today's video sponsor, Skillshare, the online learning community
with thousands of classes designed to help you learn new skills or brush up on something
that you already know whether that be graphic design, video editing, or even programming. What I really like about them is that the entire platform is designed specifically around learning. Classes are split up
into multiple sections for convenient viewing with no ad breaks. You know, like this one. One of the first classes I
started taking on Skillshare was this one on
productivity by Mike Vardy, which really goes into some good habits that you can implement into your workday which is so important
if you're self-employed or just work from home. If that sounds interesting to you, just click the link down below. And if you're one of the
first 1,000 people to do so, Skillshare will give you
a free one month trial of their premium membership which gives you access to
everything already on the site plus the new classes
that are added each week. So be sure to check them out. And huge thanks again to Skillshare for making this video possible. Now, let's get back to
talking about Windows Vista. Now, Windows Vista was
heavily promoted by Microsoft, as you would expect for
their latest product. Most notable was the "'Wow'
Starts Now" ad campaign in which Microsoft really positions Vista as this amazing groundbreaking thing. I mean, Microsoft literally compares Vista to the Apollo 11 launch
in one of these ads, at least what appears to
be the Apollo 11 launch. I spent way too much time
comparing the footage. It's clear that they cut some things and removed parts of it, but I'm just gonna say
it's the Apollo 11 launch 'cause that's what it looks like to me. And when you make a
comparison to something as historically significant
as the Apollo 11 launch, people are going to have
very high expectations for whatever it is you're selling. And so people did. I mean, when Windows Vista launched, it had all these new features and people were expecting a lot from it. The problem was not everybody
got to experience them. And that's because Vista had
higher system requirements than Windows XP. Now, of course, it's normal for these requirements
to increase over time. That's just how technology works. But the problem was, Aero
needed even beefier hardware double the RAM, a one gigahertz CPU, preferably a dual core one, and a more powerful GPU. So your XP computer might have met the minimum specifications, but not the Aero specifications. And there was actually a
class-action lawsuit over this, over the Vista Capable
branding on OEM computers. Now, Vista Capable really quickly, these were computers sold
with XP pre-installed, but then users had the option of requesting a copy of Windows Vista that looked like this, an Express Upgrade to Windows Vista. It was a full copy of Vista, like in this case, this is
Windows Vista Home Premium. So you could request that and your computer was
essentially guaranteed to be able to run Vista. Well, you're probably saying, "That sounds great, that's awesome. Give people the choice. That's wonderful." Except there was one major problem. Those computers only had to meet Windows Vista's minimum
system requirements, not the Aero system requirements. So that meant that people who
had seen these advertisements promoting Windows Vista with
all this nice Aero eye candy. And then they went to a store and purchased a Windows
Vista Capable machine. They very well could have thought that that meant they were gonna get what they saw in the ads, but that was not necessarily the case. And this also ties into our
first issue that we talked about because having two sets
of system requirements in this whole Windows Vista Capable fiasco could really confuse people. Now, one of the most common
complaints associated with Vista is compatibility issues. And if you had upgraded to it
on a relatively older machine, you probably experienced some of these. Many hardware manufacturers
just didn't have proper drivers available at the time of Vista's launch, especially for older devices. So naturally, people were pissed off because like if you're printer didn't work with the Windows Vista computer, that was a major problem. If your graphics driver
didn't work when you upgraded, that's a major problem. But blaming Microsoft entirely for this just really isn't fair
to be completely honest because these drivers
were the responsibility of the hardware manufacturers. They released the drivers. And if they just didn't have drivers available in Vista launch, that's on them. But people still blamed Microsoft and blamed Vista for those issues. And it's not really hard to see why people came to that conclusion, but it turns out that the largest cause of initial crashes in Vista was due to NVIDIA drivers. Yeah, even more than
Microsoft-related issues. And we also know this from
that class-action suit from the documents released in it. So Windows Vista, no doubt, had a rough start, but once it had been out for a few years and hardware vendors had
more time to develop drivers and people got more accustomed to the four editions of Vista, it actually became, and you might not really believe this, a pretty good operating system to use. I would say this occurred by the time Service Pack
1 was released in 2008- Looks like we're restarting here, which is pretty great. And that's a time that I remember vividly because I got a new PC that year. And sure enough it came
with Windows Vista, and I had no issues with it at all. Nothing significant that I can remember. And it's only natural, right? For software that had been out in the wild for a longer period of time to play better with the
hardware that's out there. I think that if Vista's release
was delayed a little bit, perhaps even a year, these issues wouldn't be as severe. But Microsoft was likely pretty eager to get done with Windows Vista since they had been working
on it for a very long time. Windows Vista has one of the
longest development cycles, if not the longest development cycle with the exception of Windows 10 since it was continually
in development for so long. And that's because of Windows Vista's very complex development history. Now I've talked about this a handful of times on this channel, but the major thing of note is that it did not go to
its original plan at all. And Microsoft ended up, as a last ditch effort
to save the project, ended up resetting development in the year 2004 after the OS, which at that time was known as Longhorn, had essentially become a bloated mess. But one thing I will say is it's honestly kind of a shame that Windows Vista's development ended up the way that it did because it would've been really
cool to see Windows Longhorn as Microsoft originally intended it. There were some pretty
interesting and cool features that Microsoft was working on to implement into Windows Longhorn. WinFS is a prime example. I could do an entire video on that. I probably should because
there's so much to unpack there. Really cool features like that that never saw the light of
day outside of Microsoft. And it's fun to think that, you know, what if the development
process went as intended and Longhorn, if they even
decided to call it Vista, released in 2003 and, you know, I think Windows would be
a completely different operating system today. It's just kinda fun to think about. But going back to what I was saying, Windows Vista definitely
got better over time once it had been out
there for a few years, but it's perception never did. And one of the major reasons for that, I would say, is mob mentality or groupthink, whatever you want to call it. It's really incredible how word of mouth, how that really shapes
our perception of things. Because people just heard about all these problems with Vista. People who have never used it, they saw Apple's highly
successful Get a Mac ad campaign, which pointed out all of Vista's flaws. And they said, "Well, everybody
says Vista is terrible. Everyone I know is saying, 'Don't buy it, avoid it. Stick with XP.'" And Microsoft tried to
challenge this perception with what they called
the Mojave Experiment, which not the macOS version. This was a very interesting
social experiment where Microsoft got a
handful of XP users together who had never used Windows Vista, but had a very negative view of it, a very negative perception. And when they were asked about it, they said things like, "Oh, Vista's terrible. It crashes all the time. It has all these problems. I'm not gonna get it." So Microsoft said to them, "Okay, we're gonna show you
the next version of Windows called Windows Mojave." In actuality, it was just Windows Vista rebranded to look like
this new operating system. And you know what? Over 90% of the people there praised it. They gave positive feedback. They were like, "This is great. This is awesome, I love this new feature." Some of them went into
some of the new features and said that they really liked it. Then Microsoft breaks the
news and then they say, "Well, we just showed you Windows Vista." And so it goes to show you how
people's first impressions, even if that's just by hearing from people that Vista's terrible, affects the overall reception of it. Because even today, Windows Vista is still remembered as one of the worst Windows
versions of all time. You've probably seen it
before on those list websites, "the worst operating systems ever", and Vista's always near the top. It's just become cemented. It's legacy is already finalized. The fact of the matter is
everything I've told you today probably won't do much to change it. And that's just how it is. I mean, it's been years
since Vista launched. Most people forgotten about it. They've moved on as the tech world does. But on this channel, we like to take a look back. We like to go the other direction. Talk about vintage technology, the old stuff, and how it really shaped
the modern tech world today. And Windows Vista definitely did. Even if it was in a negative way. I mean, Microsoft learned a lot from it. Well, Windows 7's launch
went a lot better, but I mean, Windows 8, nah. I mean, that was not. Microsoft, again, tried to kinda, I think push the envelope too much and it ended up backfiring on them. Yeah, that's Windows Vista. That is its legacy. And it will, even if it's not completely fair, this will be remembered as one of, if not the worst Windows
version of all time. So you know what? We're gonna explore it a little bit. Here we are at the setup screen. We've got it installed finally. And let's go ahead and go through the initial user account details
entering process here. I'm gonna choose a different
user profile this time. I always go with the default one. Let's pick that one. And we're going to call
this "VistaIsAwesome" because, well, it is. We're gonna change the default
wallpaper here to this one. I always like this one. I thought it was pretty cool. Oh, I almost forgot. We're not completely
done with the setup yet. We gotta go through the
performance checks here. Preparing your desktop. It truly never gets old, man. Oh, here it is. Here it is. So I actually don't think that this computer meets Windows Vista- Lemme just pull up the
system requirements here. So we've got, okay, yeah, we've got 1 GB of RAM and we have a 1.86 GHz processor. So we should, I think, I mean, the graphics
driver, what do we got here? Is this just integrated graphics? Windows Aero is not even an option. So it is disabled because, unfortunately, it appears that our graphics
driver is not adequate enough. So there you go. I mean, what we were just talking about. If I had purchased Windows Vista Ultimate expecting that I was gonna get
all that really cool stuff, well, turns out I'm not
going to in this case. Now, I mean, to be fair, you could totally blame that on the user. You could blame the whole thing that resulted in that class-action suit, on the users not doing enough research and looking into that stuff. But there is the argument
from the other side that Microsoft could have
been more clear about this and that's why that lawsuit even happened in the first place. So the first thing I'm gonna do is we're gonna load up some
of the Windows Vista games. Let's do Chess Titans. One of my favorite games
to play on Windows Vista. I really liked the game redesigns. I thought- we'll go intermediate here. It's been a little while since
I've played chess though. I was a huge fan of
these redesigned games. I just really, really liked them. The XP ones and the Pre-XP ones are, of course, so iconic, but it was really nice to
see how they really Aerofied, if that's even a word, like Solitaire, Spider Solitaire, and all these classics. So let's launch Solitaire here as well just to show you if ya forgot how nice that Solitaire looks here. Certainly much better than the, ugh, gosh, it still annoys me that Microsoft got rid
of the Windows card games in Windows 8 and that went into Windows 10 and Windows 11 as well. Really annoying, Microsoft. You should have kept these in because they were fricking awesome. Although they definitely
don't fit into the Windows 8, Windows 8+ design language. InkBall, too. Oh my gosh, man. InkBall, this was a really fun game. And for the longest time, I thought it was introduced
in Windows Vista, but that is not the case because this was in Tablet PC Edition, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. And this was, judging from the fact that- is that gonna go in itself? Okay, no, I had to do a little bit there. So yeah, this was in Windows
XP Tablet PC Edition, and it was intended to
be used with a stylus. And that's why your cursor here changes to this little stylus because you're supposed
to draw on the screen and get the balls into their
respective receptacles. And it gets a little bit confusing here, or not confusing, but complicated I'd say. This isn't really complicated. You got two different colors here, but it can get a little bit challenging. That's the word I'm looking for. Why couldn't I think of that? It gets a little challenging as you progress through these levels here because you don't want the
orange to go into the blue or the blue to go into the orange. So no, go that way. Go that way, come on. No, no, go this way. No, don't go that way. So yeah, I always liked this game. I spent, I mean, I'd always spend kind
of free time in here. And gosh, what else? I know I played InkBall. I played chess. I played... I never played Mahjong or Purble Place. I don't even know- what was Purble Place? Is this like a... Oh, is this like a matching thing? Yeah, I think it is. "Try to remember what
pictures are on the tiles. You turn over this way when you
find a picture you can see-" Yep, okay. I never played Purble Place
on my Windows Vista computer. I think out of all the Microsoft
games on Windows Vista, I played Chess Titans the most, but I did like Solitaire,
Spider Solitaire, and InkBall. Oh, and of course, Minesweeper. What a classic. And I really, really like what they did with Minesweeper here. It certainly is. It's not the same as Windows XP and prior, but it is pretty- Oh, and the whole mine animation as well. The mine exploding, yeah. That's really, really awesome. So let's see. Gosh, what else do we wanna do? Oh my gosh. I mean, this video is definitely
a bit on the longer side. I wanted this video to
be primarily focused on what I was talking about
during the setup process, just about Vista's legacy and all of the issues it had. Just really like talk about that and spend most of the
video talking about that. This here is just kinda having fun. We've installed it. We're just exploring around
having a good old time, right? Let's go to my computer. Let's go to, oh, you know what we can do? We can go into our Windows.old folder here and see all of our Windows 2000 stuff. So see it's copied over
the Program Files folder and the Documents and Settings. This is, like I said,
kind of a semi-upgrade because it does keep some of your files. It keeps everything in
your Documents folder and it keeps all your programs. It's just not an in-place upgrade and it does get rid of everything else. So you would definitely wanna
have backed up your hard drive or just, at least your
most important files on your hard drive before you went and
installed Windows Vista. But yeah, we can go into
Documents and Settings here and go to our m user. That's the account that
I used in Windows 2000. And if we go to My Documents, right here, we've got the four Service Packs. I just copied all four of them over 'cause I didn't know if you
could upgrade from RTM directly to Service Pack 4. Turns out you can, because I did. So that was nice. So yeah, you've got that in here. You got My Pictures. We have the classic
Windows 2000 sample photo. There it is, the only sample photo in all of Windows 2000. So yeah, and it's actually
got the My Pictures, kinda- or not the same Pictures icon here, but it's got a custom folder icon, which is pretty nice. So we could copy this over to our Pictures folder if we want to or just move it rather. And yeah, honestly guys, I think that's a good stopping point. I think we really touched on everything that I wanted to touch on. That is Windows Vista. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, be sure to give it a thumbs up and get subscribed down below, turn on notifications,
all that good stuff. And as always, I wanna thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video. (outro music)
