In early Windows XP days everybody said it was crap compared to Win2k. XP was the first one with product activation as well. And people called the Luna theme childish.
Then Vista came along and people said XP was the good one.
That doesn't prove anything. People said it was crap because it was. Then SP1 was released with 1+ year and it became pretty good. By SP3 it was rock solid because that's 7 years of bug fixes keeping other changes to minimum. That's what giving bugs does to software, no surprise here.
Microsoft made a big security pivot during XP. Gates put his foot down and forced the company to reprioritize secure engineering over everything else during the SP(2?) timeframe.
They also made a pretty big push toward formal verification of drivers, which were often the culprit for insecure/unstable machines. Their SLAM model checker [0] was avant-garde (in industry terms, at least).
Yep, the whole Trustworthy Computing initiative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing There was a huge investment in training, tools, and creating security specialists. It took a long time to turn the ship around but security issues started trending down a few years after that.
Don't forget Windows 2003 Server in that list. That, to me, was the ultimate Windows. Had the XP stuff, but with the ugly theme disabled by default. Was super stable even compared to Windows 2000. Was lightweight. Only annoying thing was it came with sound disabled, but a few clicks in the Control Panel after installing, and you were golden.
7 was just rebranded vista. It was basically vista sp3. MS knew the vista name had been badly tarnished.
The are several reasons why vista churned so badly at startup was the indexing service and the service that was trying to load everything into memory. Turn those 2 off and vista worked as good as 7, I did this to dozens of computers and the owners were so happy. Several other background services needed about 1.5GB of memory just to get the system up and running. This was when 4GB of machine was considered 'huge'. By the time 7 came out they had fixed both of those services and a 'crappy' machine had 4GB. Dumping it on a box that 512MB of memory and it struggled badly (512-1024 was the sweet spot for XP). 8GB for Vista and up and for proper use of that, you need the 64bit ver.
I am currently using Windows 7 in my personal machine (and Linux in others).
The indexing service often gets disabled because it makes the machine slow down a lot.
Also I really miss Linux "swapyness", Windows Vista+ (10 included) are really aggressive in swapping, more than needed, often my machine ended trashing because of Swap while still having 20+ GB free, this is in part because of that stupid indexing and cache, Windows 7 has a habit of giving priority to the cache, putting files from the most accessed programs in the RAM, and not caring if your CURRENT program need RAM...
I use the indexer setup to ignore parts of my system. That works pretty good. Especially if you are doing any work with nodejs. Also defragging just the index file helps a lot. That thing can end up with thousands of bits all over the drive. Even with SSD it is not great as random seek on many SSDs are fairly terrible and contig read is amazing. One trick I also do is pre-allocate my swap file (I usually pin it to 4GB). As the default is to grow/shrink.. That can do the same thing as the indexing file.
Something also changed around sp2 with 7 and file writes. Files get fragmented very quickly now even when there is plenty of space not to do so. I usually would only end up with systems badly fragmented in XP if the drive is full (much like ext4) now it just does it as a matter of course and is acting like the old DOS alg of find the next free spot.
You can still turn off the readyboost/superfetch cache service (not sure where it is win10). If you have an SSD you should not notice much difference on or off but it can happen. Turning those off makes your free RAM act more like in linux where it just caches recently read items and gives it up right away if needed.
When Vista came out I bought a new machine with AMD A6 4600+ and 2GB of RAM with Vista 64bit and it ran great. I had no driver issues or performance issue even with default install. You didn't need 4GB of RAM, you just needed new hardware. Limited RAM and drivers for the older hardware were the biggest problems, Microsoft drastically changed the driver DDK and many hardware venders had poor quality or no drivers which led to many of the problems people had. Kinda sad I got rid of this machine, it would be interesting to benchmark it to a Raspberry PI 4 in Linux.
I'm convinced if they had set a higher minimum system requirements and hid the pre-loaded memory from the task manager or labeled it more clearly Vista would be a lot more fondly remembered. Most of the people I met with negative experiences were running it on walmart "vista ready" computers that should have never certified in the first place or upgrading their old pentium 4 machine with 1GB of ram and expecting a good time.
The humorous but not wrong "consensus" was that you always had to skip a version. In this case 95 > not 98 > 98SE > not Me > XP (this was a bit of a departure because it was a successor to both the 9x and the NT lines) > not Vista > Win 7.
And both XP and Win 7 were criticized at the beginning because they had to compete with very solid predecessors, and because they came with plenty of teething problems even if they had potential. That potential was fully realized some SPs later.
This is because since at least ‘95, MS has alternated focus between base technology and polish/reliability/UX. The ones we think of as good (98SE, 2000/XP, 7) are the ones with the focus on polish. The ones we remember as flaky (ME, Vista, 8) are the ones with substantial new tech in them that hadn’t had the additional years of refinement.
I think Windows Me was just an attempt at making 98 more modern and multimedia-friendly. It was just bad, with no relevant upgrades at any layer of the stack.
i think it was the only still dos-based windows to automaticall install usb drivers for mice and usb sticks and things. we had a sony laptop running ME for a long time because it was too slow to run XP, but had a USB port already
Yet, NT4 -> W2K -> XP.... strange how the consumer degraded but the business was a real progression. I was using NT4 at my first job in 98, through till 2000 became more wide spread. Win2000 was a step up, but the driver support (IIRC) could be a bit spotty. But overall it was great. Then XP came a long and added Crayola UI and Zip folder access. It took me a lot longer to move to XP, and when I did I would always go to Control Panel and turn off the dreadful UI and make it go back to using the classic desktop style. But XP stayed relevant right up till 2013 when I changed jobs and no longer needed to use VMs as much... even then there was still one VM I needed to use that was supplied by head office. So XP for me was still in use when they EOL'd it, though only to run a legacy simulation in a VM.
W2k was the first possibly-not-utter-crap version. In the consumer space W3.1 was just DOS with Windows, and didn't even have full multitasking.
W95 was 60% bugs and 40% OS. There was even a really obvious bug in the calculator app. There were all kinds of very very weird - i.e. bad - design decisions both in the code and in the UI. Trying to find fixes and workarounds literally wasted days of almost everyone's time.
The initial release of XP was workable, but by SP1 it was fairly stable and you could actually use it as a working OS without having to deal with driver issues and constant crashes.
Vista was another dog. W7 was very possibly the best Windows. 8 was another WTAF release. 10 is 8 with some improvements, but some added evil in the form of forced telemetry for most users, and such.
For me, Windows 95 OSR2 (OEM service release 2) and 98 were more stable than stock 95. I remember having to obtain it via one of those "100 in 1" pirated CDs, because the OSRs weren't made available to the end users.
I don't use Windows day to day anymore but, my family has Windows 10 and I manage it.
When I sit in the front of the computer, I feel like I'm inside the big space ship in the Wall-e. All the advertisements, forced consumerism and everything.
I had run tr0nscript on the computer I support for family a few years ago, and that made the experience almost reasonable.
I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. I did need to fix the hosts file to allow windows to get security updates - but otherwise, that machine still feels as usable as win7 except for the degraded shell (which could be replaced with classic shell, I guess, but I didn’t bother).
> I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons.
Looked to what it's doing in every step [0]. It's a bit overzealous while doing what it's doing. Also, its default are not the most sensible ones so, if you're not running it after installation it may change the behavior of the system quite a bit.
Removal of metro apps, resetting IE, purging %APP_DATA% storage, removal of some VCS snapshots... It's a thermonuclear option to take. To be able to run in a milder, sensible manner needs a lot of tuning. So it's not practical.
I really don't know what people are talking about ads? My win 10 has zero ads on it. I turned off all telemetry (i think) with a couple of programs dedicated to doing that. Maybe my pi-hole is blocking the ads?
To me it's always been win2k, win 7, win 10, win 98. In tthat order. I've been using win2k rather than windows xp when I need legacy application support, though you might need to jump through some hoops for XP compatibility and drivers.
Though I've been inpressed by how snappy windows 8 feels, especially the boot time which is the fastest of all versions.
8 was the first version that hibernates the kernel on shutdown so it can reload it from snapshot on boot. That’s why all windows versions since 8 boot so fast.
Still Windows 8 boots faster for me. A clean installation is 2 seconds from bios to login (not hibernated, but "fast startup"), and perhaps 5-6 seconds for windows 10 (also with fast startup enabled, which it is on both on a default install).
Personal experience would indicate that a lot of people hated Windows 8, not just because it took something they were familiar with and threw the biggest curveball at it possible, but because they actively made the UI/UX significantly more difficult to use.
For me the icing on the cake was segregating different apps between "tablet mode" and "desktop mode," where the former would take up the entire screen with no reasonable way to multitask between programs. Not only that but how many apps had (and even still have) both a UWP and standard implementation, from my experience that just confused users as to which they were supposed to use. Heck even today we still have the Settings app and the Control Panel (which is increasingly difficult to access I might add), both with various controls and settings only found in one but not the other.
IMO Windows 10 (sans tracking and forced pre/auto-installing apps) is what Windows 8 should have been from the beginning. Many beneficial changes under the hood, and minor UI changes that don't entirely change the workflow of the OS, but instead augment it for a better experience for both regular and power users. Somehow we've eclipsed the 5-year mark since its release, yet Windows 10 still feels incomplete. Not even just that, but they manage to make it feel even less finished with every new update.
I think the biggest change that killed 8 was the lack of the start menu. Having to go to the start screen - pulling you away from your entire desktop just to launch an app - was awful. I know Win 8.1 got it back, but for the time between 8 and 8.1 Classic Shell was almost necessary to use Windows 8. All that for no discernible benefit over using 7.
Although I find 8.1 still better than 10. Some of its
preinstalled apps and UI were just weird, but at least it wasn't
anti-user by design. Both are a clear downgrade to Windows 7
though.
Windows 8 is fine, _if_ you actually know how to use Windows. (Protip: Win-D takes you to the desktop from the app grid.) I would go so far as to say it's good, if you're using a touchscreen or tablet; the live tiles were useful.
Always amused me that the OS X Launchpad is also a ugly grid of huge app icons that takes up the entire screen, just like the Windows 8 start screen, yet nobody says a word about that.
8 was great on the intended devices. I used it on an asus transformer tablet/laptop and it worked really well. W10 was a step down for that machine because they dialed back the tablet UI.
Me too, for a simple reason: Windows 7 can be made to look and behave almost identically as Windows 95 did in terms of UI - which is, to this day, widely praised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21878006
Windows 8 and 10? Not at all. It's a wild, wild mixture of the good old UI and... an abomination of stuff clearly "designed" for touch screens. Not to mention all the privacy and advertising issues.
Windows XP SP3 was solid as hell. It was easy to change the theme, which I always did along with the brain dead "hide extensions and system files" and ridiculous swap file settings that guaranteed you'd always be resizing incessantly
Funny enough win2k was the first to have a somewhat decent multi-language management, in particular you didn’t need a dedicated CJK version. So that’s where the nostalgia loop would stop for a lot of us (and it was buggy as hell, of course)
It is quite sad that we might never experience that stability and usuability of commercial big apps/os anymore in the age of penny
squeezing and spyware.
I had my Win XP, Photoshop and MS Office with ever lasting licsenses. You need FOSS today for that. As soon as you pay for software nowadays you are a loser, in general.
>As soon as you pay for software nowadays you are a loser, in general.
That is so true! I buy'd a Lifetime License for Insync and Jaikoz, Insync's lifetime was 4 Years (then they changed the license for updates) and Jaikoz "Lifetime" was 6 Years, change the name of the Software and split it in two different product and the 'old' one was not maintained anymore.
Then Vista came along and people said XP was the good one.