Valve ends Windows XP and Vista Steam support

[HEXUS]

And there is a little over a year left of extended support for Windows 7 from Microsoft.

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[Korrorra]

Poor windows Vista. I never gave Vista a chance like windows 8/8.1 and got on the bandwagon to push it out of town. Amazing what you can do with an OS when you have the cpu/ram for it. Windows XP was one of my favorites. Upgrading from windows 98SE was like the seeing sunlight for the first time. Windows XP still had crashes, though the crashing was a lot less then the previous OS had. I think windows 7 and windows 8/8.1 was very good OSes for gaming. Some things run better in older versions of windows than on the newest windows 10. Something about windows 10 just makes everything lag or stutter.

[Ferral]

I do have an old XP machine but that is literally used just for writing floppy discs, it's not even on the internet!!

No reason to be using the old Operating Systems now in all fairness especially if you use your PC for gaming or modern application

[philehidiot]

Vista was awful. You did yourself a favour by not giving it a chance. It was released purely as a method of increasing sales of blood pressure medication.

[excalibur1814]

Vista was perfectly fine and people simply did not understand superfetch. That and oems releasing machines with less than 1Gb ram didn't help.

[winactive]

Best thing you could do with Superfetch was disable it and (by that token) ReadyBoost. The last part of your sentence was correct. Vista required about 400MB RAM to run so 1GB was useless, disk swap ensued.

[philehidiot]

Vista was perfectly fine and people simply did not understand superfetch. That and oems releasing machines with less than 1Gb ram didn't help.

Might have been fine for you, but I'd say the general consensus is that it was dire. We ran it on a reasonably high end machine for the time and using Vista instead of XP was a source of massive regret. Unfortunately for other reasons we pretty much had to stick with Vista until Windows 7 came out. After seeing how awful it was on that machine, it never went near any of the others.

[lodore]

Not really a surprise considering how long ago Microsoft ended support for XP.

I feel the main reason why people had issues with vista other than systems with low ram was that many developers had to rewrite software and not be lazy as they got used to users being able to write to almost any folder. I think that is also why windows 7 had a better reception as the majority of software has been written better by then and due to this Microsoft amended UAC as UAC default in vista was used to force developers to amend software to not annoy users with all the prompts.

I had a choice is having Xp or vista and choose vista at the time. It had a few bugs before SP1 but was fine after that. only real issue before SP1 was the gadget sidebar so I just turned it off.
I run vista then 7 then 8 on the same machine. each version of windows got faster on the same hardware.

I did experience some issues supporting vista for customers on HP machines. SP1 and then 2 sometimes didn't want to install no matter what was attempted so a reinstall was needed but I had a custom machine and didn't have that issue on my machine.

I think windows 7 support end will be more of a deal as not many people liked the metro interface so stayed on 7. The interface did get better with 8.1. Will only be a few years until only windows 10 is supported anyway.

In my experience windows xp required two service packs to be good.
Vista required one service pack to be good.
Windows 7 worked well from day one and so did 8. the only thing with windows 8 was the horrible interface that got toned down with 8.1

Windows 10 has generally worked well for me but I have done a few reinstalls due to the amount of changes made since it was released. Due to the two major updates a year a reinstall is very quick and means that I only install what I am using.

I am wonder if only supporting windows 10 with the regular releases will require more or less resources than having to currently support windows 7 8.1 and 10.
If windows 10 will require less resources to support than support for other platforms could be better and this wont only effect Valve.

[spacein_vader]

Might have been fine for you, but I'd say the general consensus is that it was dire. We ran it on a reasonably high end machine for the time and using Vista instead of XP was a source of massive regret. Unfortunately for other reasons we pretty much had to stick with Vista until Windows 7 came out. After seeing how awful it was on that machine, it never went near any of the others.

The fact that Win7 did so well despite essentially being Vista service pack 3 says they didn't get it all wrong. They just needed to tweak the UI side of it.

UAC, secure driver model, much better isolation of apps from the OS and more can all be traced back to vista.

It could be argued that it was the last major change to Windows, 7, 8 & 10 have built in n it but not altered much of the foundations.

[philehidiot]

UAC, secure driver model, much better isolation of apps from the OS and more can all be traced back to vista.

It could be argued that it was the last major change to Windows, 7, 8 & 10 have built in n it but not altered much of the foundations.

Giving it some credit, it was probably the fact that so many new and novel features were included that made it the mess it was. Windows 7 was when they'd got the chance to fix it all. In a way this kind of thing (which wasn't isolated to Vista) justifies the Windows 10 approach where, instead of a whole new OS with loads of new, untested features being rolled out after years of work, the OS is upgraded and tweaked gradually with a new feature each month. If nothing else it does mean you can track down issues far easier as you're changing one thing at a time rather than changing loads of things in a massive release and being inundated with problems. But changing to that system has its own issues so really they can't do right for doing wrong can't poor Microsoft.

[Corky34]

My rose tinted glasses are telling me Windows 95 was the best, i remember having great fun deleting things from the Windows folder to reduce its size without killing Windows.

Oh so it needs explorer.exe to work.

[philehidiot]

My rose tinted glasses are telling me Windows 95 was the best, i remember having great fun deleting things from the Windows folder to reduce its size without killing Windows.

Oh so it needs explorer.exe to work.

I remember it taking 4 hours to finally complete installation due to repeated crashes and the cheers when it finally worked. Kinda set the scene for the next few years.

[delta5361]

I agree, shame over Vista but always seemed to crash for me originally. Reverted to XP and then Windows 7 which worked great.

[Corky34]

I remember it taking 4 hours to finally complete installation due to repeated crashes and the cheers when it finally worked. Kinda set the scene for the next few years.

Floppies were the bomb weren't they.

[badass]

Vista was perfectly fine and people simply did not understand superfetch. That and oems releasing machines with less than 1Gb ram didn't help.

And therein lies the problem. To use your OS without it having dire performance, you shouldn't have to "understand superfetch"
No one needed to for XP or 7.
My experience of Vista was mixed. On my PC it had 8GB RAM and I only installed vista 8 months after release. I had no problem with it as 90% of the time, I just put it to sleep rather than shut down.
However dealing with a number of laptops where it wouldn't just leave the god damn HDD alone EVER including when you were using it and when you have many GB of RAM helped me understand the visceral hate directed towards it.

[badass]

Floppies were the bomb weren't they.

Indeed. I remember the incredibly forward looking individuals at Microsoft originally requiring a floppy drive to install custom storage drivers. It took a huge backlash from future users for them to see how dumb they were being and introduce options around USB thumbdrives.