• dan@upvote.au
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      8 months ago

      Vista did a bunch of great things… It added BitLocker drive encryption. It added the Snipping Tool for screenshots. It added a newer driver model that end up making drivers far more reliable than on Windows 9x and XP. It required drivers to be signed, which helps a lot with security. It added UAC, which was initially painful but also really helped improve security (no more running every single process with admin permissions). It moved C:\Documents and Settings\ to C:\Users so we didn’t have to type that long path any more. And probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting

      It was kinda half-baked at the time, but these are all major defining features of Windows. It just took a while for them to become stable.

      • Midnight Wolf@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Self-healing capabilities, and the ability to do an ‘in-place upgrade’ (installing win over itself without data loss) were huge too. I had to wipe + reinstall XP dozens of times throughout the years, often for some small bullshit. I was a Vista beta tester, and got a copy for my machine as soon as it went gold. I went all-in and it was actually a fantastic OS. 7 was good too, but it didn’t do that much new, comparatively. It stood on the shoulders of giants.

        All live Windows Longhorn (Vista).