Which is the best windows xp or vista

Most people prefer XP, over Vista, claiming that is it much more user friendly and efficient that Vista. They also criticize Vista for have additional hardware requirements that XP. Microsoft included a number of additional upgrades and features in Vista refer table , some of which users claimed impeded usage instead of enhancing it, e. The UAC, meant to block software from silently gaining administrator privileges without the user's knowledge, has been criticized for generating prompts at every turn possible, even at basic commands such moving something in the Start Menu.

All in all, Vista failed to persuade users to shift from XP, with many users even skipping Vista entirely and waiting for the next thing to come along. As a result, I was fairly positive about Vista last year. I felt like once these details were taken care of, we might have a worthy upgrade. Someone, somewhere in the heirarchy decided that "customer" was synonymous with "beta tester.

The Games Explorer, ignoring how poor a choice for gaming Vista is right now, is a very welcome addition as well. Cleaner, simpler. The newly redesigned start menu dedicates individual folders to music, pictures, video, documents, games, and so on. No more downloading crap straight to your desktop or losing it in My Documents. This abstraction is a far cry from having to make folders in old Windows versions and mixing up all your stuff. Windows Sidebar and Gadgets can be seen on the right side of the screen in this Vista screenshot.

Icons are vivid, operations are more animated, and the UI moves more fluidly by virtue of being offloaded to the graphics processor. They could be right. Everyone is used to them. Such is the way of the menu bar. You may wonder what the heck happened to it in Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and elsewhere.

I know I wind up getting mixed up. Windows tend to be busy, full of color and information that, while nice to look at, can easily confuse the neophyte. People that have spent years getting used to Windows now need to change their habits again. Because Microsoft thinks making you learn a new system is better, underlining the difference between what a programmer finds intuitive and what an average joe finds intuitive.

Let me explain. When you try to install a program, UAC will dim your entire screen and lock up the machine until you respond to the window in the middle of the screen that asks for your permission to run the file. Wes: Basically all I remember about ME is that a family friend had a computer running it, and it reliably crashed pretty much every time I used it.

This was the version of Windows for chumps, while those in the know landed on the rock solid Windows until XP came along and got its first few patches. These days I think people look back on Vista with some sympathy.

As Linus Tech Tips argued , Vista didn't entirely deserve its bad rap. There were certainly some painful performance issues at the start; Vista was certainly more demanding than Windows XP, and some systems that were touted as being able to run Vista really couldn't… or they only could if you turned off all the graphical niceties, like the Aero transparency effects. And Vista was such a major overhaul of the OS coming from XP, Vista needed entirely new drivers which were slow to arrive.

That meant some hardware just didn't work on Vista and many games ran far worse than they did on XP. It was a terrible launch. Oh, and the wonderful User Account Control pop-ups! Yeah, everyone hated those, and no one understood why Vista was taking over your entire screen to warn you every time you tried to change a setting in the control panel or launch a program.

But underneath those very glaring flaws, Vista introduced a huge slew of new features and looked cutting edge compared to XP. It overhauled practically every Windows system from XP. It was a big step forward! In return for that step, you just had to put up with your games running worse, your printer not working, and pop-ups nagging you all the time. The best thing that can be said for Vista is that most of its fundamental improvements returned practically unchanged in Windows 7 just a few years later… and everybody loved them.

Jody: I bought a laptop that came with Vista pre-installed, and it really shouldn't have. That damn OS made it run like arse. Took forever to boot, or do anything really, even with all the swishy nonsense turned off.

I'm still mad at Vista like 12 years later. Morgan: Like Jody, my first laptop ever came with Vista. I remember staring at the little clock widget on my desktop while I waited seconds for Minecraft to open.

I do not recommend trying to game on a bottom-of-the-line Dell laptop running Vista. Evan: It's inseparable from the darkness and suffering of Games for Windows Live, for me. GfWL came a year later, in I'd peg it as one of the lowest points in PC gaming's history—Microsoft at its least-competent as a steward for the platform, and at its most meddlesome. Never again.

Wes : I was somewhat obsessed with the glassy "Aero" aesthetic of Windows Vista and its glossy take on the taskbar and Start button. It looked so high tech at the time because, whoa, transparency! I definitely installed a Windows XP skin to mimic Vista's aesthetic, but I held out from actually using the OS for awhile, because it had some fairly heavy system requirements at the time.

One of my friends upgraded just to play Halo 2 for PC, which was exclusive to Vista. It wasn't worth it. Tyler: Like Wes, I was really into the look here. I'd always loved the idea of having little widgets on my desktop, even though I did not then and have never needed a larger clock sitting on the desktop, which I never look at. I guess I just wanted my PC to feel like a control center for, I don't know, someone important.

In the early days, Windows was not popular. Or particularly good. The Macintosh OS was far more robust, and Windows only saw limited use with versions 1. Windows 3. Up until that point, PC users could do some things in Windows, but still had to switch over to the DOS prompt to run many applications.

And Windows 3. You could do more than one thing at a time thanks to smarter memory management! It had Solitaire! This was the point where Windows crossed the threshold from being a kinda-useful add-on to DOS, to being a better, easier way for most people to do things on their computer.

Wes: Yes, youngling, but like most other '90s kids I feel like the OS practically didn't exist until Windows 3. Every computer I used in my early childhood, except the school computer lab Macs, ran Windows 3. Shout out to Norton Commander for being the first software I learned how to use. Was the Start menu the biggest advancement in computer UI after the clickable icon?

Windows 95 really did feel like a quantum leap in how we used our computers, complex and new enough that it needed a lengthy video from the hottest sitcom stars around to explain how it worked. So much of what Microsoft introduced in Windows 95 is still key to our PCs today. We still use a start menu, taskbar, and system tray in mostly the same way; those features have proven resilient even to Microsoft itself trying to replace them. Windows 95 set a precedent for compatibility that later versions of Windows would mostly follow, running on top of DOS and still supporting bit applications while being built for a bit future.

And people loved it. Windows 95's adoption was tremendous. Windows 95 certainly had its flaws and was prone to crashing, but that was the price of its innovation. In influence, it's probably the most important version of Windows ever made. Yet it's outranked here by some of its successors because they show how quickly technology evolved from '; they simply did what Windows 95 did, but better. Shaun: All I remember is my Uncle Bill being extremely angry about Windows 95 for some reason that was inexplicable to me at the time.

Evan: Vivid memory of seeing the Start button for the first time on a desktop in my uncle's basement and being afraid to push it. I thought it was some kind of ignition. This proved true for our application tests as well. Once again, however, both were trounced by the newcomer.

You might have spotted the theme here. Windows 7 delivered excellent results, beating or coming close to the performance of the lightweight XP in just about every category. It's quite remarkable given that this is an operating system still in beta.

When all the drivers are fully finished, we should see even better performance. But for even a fairly basic modern PC, Windows 7 delivers the best performance around. North America.

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