I'll quote one, because many of you ignored me and decided to bang on UAC when it clearly falls outside of the criteria I stated.
Beldaran wrote:Not an indictment of the OS.
Indirectly, yes. Win98 was built upon the Win95 kernel, which was a house of cards that surprisingly worked. According to Charles Petzold's
Programming Windows, this was a 32-bit and 16-bit kernel running simultaneously. 32-bit calls were translated into 16-bit calls. It was shaky at best and awful at worst. The NT kernel (which the beloved Win2K and XP were based upon) was full 32-bit and translated 16-bit calls to 32-bit for compatibility.
This dedication to compatibility is mostly why the awful drivers were Win9x's fault.
There wasn't a Windows Hardware Quality Lab back then, and there wasn't really an incentive to go through Windows Logo Verification. Hardware companies could hire the cheapest, dumbest programmers possible and as long as they could say, "It works on my machine" they shipped it. These days, if you don't want users to get the scary "unsigned driver" dialog you go through Windows Logo Verification in which they put your drivers through the wringer so you can put that "designed for Windows" sticker on the box. If you follow app compatibility team blogs like Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing, you'll see that frequently companies relied on undocumented implementation details that failed miserably in such exotic scenarios as, "non-English Windows" or "you installed an HP printer driver".
The next problem is the non-NT kernels were not designed to be modular and had monolithic kernels. This meant if your printer driver crashed, it killed the kernel and you were going to have to reboot. I had an HP printer that, if I canceled a print, the computer was guaranteed to lock up within 30 minutes if I didn't reboot. XP and Vista load drivers into modular subsystems that can be unloaded and reloaded on a whim, and because of this it's much less likely your drivers will ruin the kernel. (Yes, Linux has been like this from the start. Eat it.)
Vista has a completely different driver model; I don't know much about it but I do know the intent was to make drivers more reliable. If your Windows 98 installation was rock-solid stable it's because you had a really reliable hardware setup and honestly I don't believe you.
Now, UAC. Here's the Windows 7 blog's take on it. First, it was designed to be initially painful so that lazy companies would quit writing software that required admin privileges when they didn't need it. Let's put some numbers to this.
75% of the machines that were surveyed have a single account with full administrator privileges. This is awful and the main reason why the same nerds who whine about UAC used to whine about how insecure Windows is. When Vista launched, Microsoft cataloged 775,312 unique applications that needlessly presented a UAC prompt, and users experienced one or more prompts in 50% of sessions. As of August 2008, this has been reduced to 168,149 applications and users and 33% of sessions. That's 460% reduction in applications that present a UAC prompt. The strategy worked. Vista SP1 dramatically reduced the number of UAC prompts that were presented, and the Windows 7 team is working on reducing it further.
One opinion for which there is no good data is that the longer a user uses Vista, the fewer UAC prompts they'll see. This makes sense: when you first buy the machine you're installing apps and reconfiguring settings and you'll get pestered pretty fierce. But a few months later, you're not installing things so much or changing system settings anymore, so you see UAC less. (This is why I said I wanted complaints that don't get better over time.)
I will agree that Vista's minimum requirements seem pretty large. What's the minimum requirements for OS X? Isn't it requiring practically the same thing? The difference there is Apple doesn't sell machines that can't run OS X at all. On the PC side you can still get el cheapo machines that can barely run XP. Yet of course Microsoft's the bad guy for listening to the nerd community rage that Windows isn't shiny enough. Turn off glass and Vista does well on low-end machines. Imagine that!
*edit* Also, trying to market it as "lucky" isn't going to be done by MS. 7 is only a lucky number in Western societies. For example, China holds the number 8 in the same regard. It's possible that some cultures see 7 as an unlucky number, so I highly doubt this was a motivation in the selection of the name. I like it because it works.
