Microsoft removes the whiff of Vista from Windows 11 Insider Preview Great news! Microsoft has finally squashed a Windows 11 Insider bug. No, it still hasn't "Made the Start Menu Great Again." No, you still can't drag the taskbar wherever you like. But yes, it simply kills the bug that played the Windows Vista boot chime on startup. The bug was introduced in a Windows Insider Preview build of …
The biggest enemy to Vista was that godforsaken "Vista Ready" badge slapped all over hardware that was anything but capable of running it.
If you had a machine with a decent spec - specifically RAM - it was actually not a bad OS.
I preferred the look and feel over XP (appreciate that is a very personal perspective) and I never found it dog-awful like, say 8.x.
But when my dad tried to put it on an aging PC with 1 or 2GB (I forget which) RAM it was absolutely terrible. Unusable until the RAM was upgraded.
As far as I'm aware, Windows 7 *was* basically Vista with most of the egregious problems fixed and after they'd optimised it to run far more efficiently on less powerful hardware. In other words, what it probably should have been in the first place.
By that token, one could argue it was "Windows Vista Second Edition" in all but name. Though, of course, there wasn't a chance in hell they were going to call it that after the debacle of the first version had irredeemably tainted that moniker.
...is yet another user customisation that's been taken away? Is there anything left of the OS "look and feel" that the user can make their own or is everything dictated by MS now?
(I don't use it personally, just the locked down corporate builds at work, and there's pretty much nothing we users can change.)
I fail to see how vista_startup.wav could "accidentally" have been included in the Windows 11 build process.
The most likely explanation is that a developer put it in the tree as a private joke, and it was inadvertently included in the build.
What next, "accidentally" including the Windows XP Teletubbies wallpaper, or the WfWG3.11 startup logo?
> "The most likely explanation is that a developer put it in the tree as a private joke, and it was inadvertently included in the build."
That was what I suspected too.
I might otherwise have leaned towards this being a nostalgia-invoking publicity stunt. But, as the article makes clear, the associations and comparisons that it invites between Windows Vista and 11 aren't flattering, and I suspect even MS's PR would realise it's not worth the risk given that the latter doesn't exactly have an excess of positivity it can afford to burn in the first place.
> why an OS needs a startup sound at all?
Mine doesn't.
I also have no "wallpaper". If I want an image I'll print it and tack it to a wall. Windows loves to re-draw the whole desktop for little or no reason, this saves perceptible time. Sadly some *nix desktops don't give that choice, so I have to go through their idea of PAINT to make a 1px image to tile.
Vista would probably run fine on today's hardware. I'd rather that (or preferably W7) than the absolute shit that is W11, and especially 24H2. The next, 25H2, being based on 24H2, is likely to be no better unfortunately. I'm glad I run Windows in a "for reference VM" these days and go weeks without having to set eyes on it.
That said, in retrospect, perhaps Windows Vista was given too much of a hard time.
No, it wasn't.
It was a shining beacon of Microsoft’s hubris, both it's storied development and it's eventual release.
I often hold up Windows 7 as an example of what good UI can do, as that's really just Vista with the UI tarted up a bit (and that annoying feature where opening more windows made the machine appear to slow down removed).
My remaining Win7 machine (running some legacy software) still looks like Win 95 with the plain, no frills interface. I detested the Win Aero look of XP and so stayed with the original (and IMHO best) plain Jane looks. All I want my OS to do is to enable my to do my job without getting in the way. To be fair, I'm OK with the Win 10 interface now that I have removed the crapware.
I spent so little time with Vista installed (on my first ever brand new laptop, and it ran like utter crap with Vista (but fortunately came with XP 'downgrade' media (yes, Dr Evil air quotes around 'downgrade')))* that I had no recollection of what the startup sound sounded like.
It's the Windows 7 one as well, isn't it.
*I think that sentence might actually be a spreadsheet formula.
