Windows Vista: It was hyped as the glossy, shimmering future of computing, but turned into a digital punchline. Vista arrived three years late after a hellish development cycle and became infamous for sluggish performance, driver crashes and obnoxious security alerts.
It's been 18 years now since Vista launched, and if you remember powering on your wheezy old Dell Dimension to the chorus of this iconic startup sound then you, like me, probably look back on Vista with at least a twinge of nostalgia.
2007 feels like a very long time ago... and yet still oddly connected to the present. The iPhone was a thing -- though only just. The social media boom was well underway. But at the same time, it was only a decade removed from the PC craze of the 1990s, when Windows looked and the PCs on which it ran looked very different.
That's the world Windows Vista crashed into in January of '07. So in our deep-dive on this often misunderstood piece of software, we're going to dig into how Vista became Vista, the legacy of the OS, and whether it really deserves the derision it's faced over the years.
00:00 - Intro
01:07 - Longhorn: Vista Pre-History
06:04 - The Reset: Vista Becomes Vista
09:14 - The Launch (And The Backlash)
16:51 - Fixing the Fallout: Vista Done Right?
20:03 - Reflections 18 Years On