Re: Haters gonna hate
"But if you bought a new machine when Vista first launched, and experienced the driver and other issues that many people did, I think you'd be a bit more equivocal about that "solid under-the-hood improvement over XP". "
I wouldn't put driver issues down to the OS tbh. Otherwise we'd have to say Linux was a 'bad' OS right up until the mid-2000s, which simply isn't true. Plus, bad drivers were the cause of most BSODs, which were pretty commonplace in early XP (and 2000, and 98, and 95...). Vista actually had the ability to close a dud driver down gracefully where in XP it would simply tank the whole system.
The reason for many of the driver issues in early Vista was that they'd shifted the standards from WDM to WDF, and suddenly a lot of older drivers were found to be horrifically badly put together and insecure by default. MS wanted to move as much as they could to user-mode frameworks that were both easier to write correctly and infinitely better security practice; many previously-existing drivers fell really badly foul of this, or demanded to sit in the kernel even when there was no good reason for them to do so.
So really, the poor driver support was literally the flipside of the same coin as the stability and security improvements.You couldn't have good aspects without invalidating a lot of amateurish code.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
