Nowadays Windows is filled with adware and is fairly slow, but it wasn’t always like this. Was there a particular time where a change occurred?
Windows Vista was the start in my eyes. XP (pro) was amazing. And then Vista came out and it broke a lot of things. Security was garbage, applications would constantly lose root files
Vista only lasted 2 years before they went back and turned it into Windows 7 with a few small tweaks, but more or less the exact same thing
98, XP, 7, 10: Good.
ME, Vista, 8, 11: Bad.
It’s Star Trek Movies all over again. We just need to hang on for Windows 12.
98 still had plenty of jank, but it was worlds better than 95. I would add 3/3.11 to the “good” list if only because that was basically the only other option for a lot of people and it did what it needed to. I don’t recall personally seeing windows 1 or 2.
edit: I guess I could throw NT mostly into the good section, but I mostly just did tech support for it rather than using it.
12 is in a weird cybersecurity limbo. It’s supposed to have a top-notch built in anti-virus and firewall, but Microsoft has said the same thing for Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11. Yet systems are still getting compromised. If Microsoft included a VPN with insurance guarantee of function, I’d be 1000% on board
Windows Defender is actually really good for the common person. If you’re doing highly risky things then perhaps getting better software would be warranted. But if your doing low risk activates, Windows defender is pretty great.
Also, that’s not what VPNs do; you can still download ransomware through a VPN tunnel.
Yeah. I know VPN subscriptions have always been too good to be true. It’s not like I do high profile stuff on my PC, but VPN subscriptions means a cracked back door which doesn’t sit well with me regardless of who or what already has access to my shit.
Vista
7 was good though
7 was the peak of the curve, with everything starting a downward trend with 8.
7 was genuinely the best windows operating system. It was stable, slick, easy to use, and generally unobtrusive to what you were trying to do, and you didnt have to do daily reboots or regular reformats to clean up after it like you had to do with all its predecessors.
Windows 7 exists, and there’s no need to improve upon perfection. But there’s no money in releasing nothing, so they release ad-filled “upgrades” to bring in more money from the doofuses who buy it.
I would have been happy to pay for continued improvements to DirectX and Vulcan and increasing security and minor useful incremental changes over time keeping the same Windows 7 playbook running. I wish I lived in the timeline where our greatest complaint with Windows is that it hasn’t changed very much in the last 15 years.
Yeah, every UI change since 7 has been for the worse, increasing the number of steps required to get work done.
I heard someone refer to what happened from XP to 10 as “onioneering” because they just added layers.
TIL Windows is an ogre…
To be fair, 10’s Settings screen makes dealing with wifi and bluetooth much easier than 7
I wasn’t using bluetooth with 7, so you could be right. But if I need to fiddle with wifi beyond just changing what AP I’m connected to, the network settings I typically want to look at, eg disabling adapters or manually setting an IP address, were available in fewer steps in 7 versus 10.
Yeah but they had to do that because bluetooth became much more commonplace between 7 and 10.
Although I’m not sure if it was like that out of the box or it was improved with an update.
Vista* but otherwise yes
How bad is security if you still have Windows 7 installed today?
Looks like 3% of windows users worldwide could help answer that question. Well, up to 3%… guessing not too many of them are too savvy.
I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that those machines are corporate owned and running legacy systems that are hanging on by a thread.
Every year someone talks about replacing Ol’ Smoky but the new system would need to go through validation and that costs time and money so they limp along for another year
I try to not connect mine to the internet anymore
This is something Apple got right. OS X 10.0 was good and they’ve made lots of incremental changes but didn’t just arbitrarily change the whole “centered application dock at the bottom and menu bar at the top” situation. When new form factors emerged, they just made a new interface and didn’t try to hot glue a mouse/touchpad OS and touchscreen OS together for the fuck of it.
To be honest I’d go as far back as XP and say that was fine, 7 was also but I’ve never liked the start menu etc since and the forced updates really just wind me up.
Microsoft has always made windows good… … … For them.
When was Windows 1 released?
From the very beginning, it always had particular features which were designed to make things worse for the users for some business reason for Microsoft. After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done - it wasn’t slow or lacking important features or unstable (relatively speaking, at least), and so the only changes being made to it from then on were adding crappiness to it for some reason related to business priorities or just simple stupidity. And so, it entered its slide.
After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done
There were a lot of big things happening in computer hardware: migration to 64-bit instruction sets and memory addressing, multicore processors, the rise of the GPU. The security paradigm also shifted to less trust between programs, with a lot of implementation details on encryption and permissions.
So I’d argue that Windows has some pretty different things going on under the hood from what it was 20 years ago.
They must’ve stopped with Windows 11 because I’m still on Windows 10 Pro and don’t see even a fraction of the BS I keep hearing about Windows having.
I think they tried on 8 to make something and it was a flop then they flipped their whole business model upside down when they released 10
I suppose the weird surprise lesson of the Windows 8 fiasco is no matter how badly they bollixed it up, they wouldn’t lose enough customers that they could afford break a lot more of the user experience than they ever originally thought.
Even Vista, while people had issues*, still provided a largely familiar interface and didn’t go out of its way to break muscle memory and traditional workflows.
IMO, Vista wasn’t as bad as is commonly held. A lot of the problem was that it was more resource-intensive than previous systems-- it really asked for decent graphics cards and 2Gb memory, but they sold a lot of cheap machines with 512Mb and crappy shared-memory chipsets that only qualified as “Vista Basic Capable” so that the manufacturers wouldn’t have to formally declare them obsolete. Some drivers had teething trouble, but switching to 64 bit was going to have growing pains anyway.
I’m on 11 and don’t see it either because I turned it off a long time ago and it has yet to turn back on, ever.
Windows 1.0; November 20, 1985.
I was going to say, post 3.11, but maybe you’re right ;-)
windows 8 is a strong candidate, because that was their huge push into trying to remodel the OS in the image of mobile OSes. you had to perform quite the exorcism to get it functional. i skipped Vista so I’m not the best source on this but my understanding is that the issue with Vista is less that it was loaded with dark patterns and trying to be a walled garden and more just an unfortunate time to be an OS with the technology and security landscapes changing.
of course, while the base OS wasn’t necessarily always the problem, Microsoft has anti-competitive practices going back even further and you could argue Windows stopped being good when MS started bundling Internet Explorer with it, so it all depends where you draw the line. might be safest to say their last truly good OS was MSX-DOS just because they abandoned it before they could do anything scummy
Best home screen ever
Windows 2000 was the peak - rock solid with no visual fluff. XP was 2000 with a childish skin on it and it’s all downhill from there.
I’ve always believed that 2k was the best software they ever produced.
Nah, that would surely be a game or something. Maybe Age of Empires II?
Naw, the best software they’ve ever produced is 6502 BASIC.
Though Flight Simulator does get an honorable mention.
I remember all the nicknames from when XP came out. I don’t remember which was more common; disco windows, or teletubby windows.
In my neck of the woods it was called fisher price windows lol
I gamed on Win2k until I couldn’t anymore because of requirements. It was excellent.
I eventually ended up on XP, and the first thing I did was shut off the Fisher Price skin. It still never ran quite as good as Win2k.
Oh man that was one of the few windows distros I never felt too compelled to reinstall. Perf just never degraded that much with a reasonably defragged drive (jesus I am dating myself with that statement)
It’s weird to not see any posts about Azure. I remember watching a keynote from Microsoft’s CEO several years ago where he explicitly said the company’s focus was on Azure and cloud applications, and that the role of Windows was simply to get you there. That’s it. This is also inline with comments about Win7 being the last good OS because that’s about when the transition started.
every other version is good
Bill Gates? Is that you?
Nope. That’s an old meme, that still checks out. There is still hope for Windows 12.
I agree on the ads and bundled services, but the “windows is slow” stuff is horseshit. A tight build of Linux boots more quickly no doubt, but a fresh Win10 or 11 install, even with bloat, is up in under 30 seconds, and runs swiftly out of the box. This isn’t “slow” by any definition.
Again, let’s hate the other shit, let’s hate on that together.
Yeah I might have phrased that wrong. On my computer windows uses about 40% of my laptop cpu with nothing else running, but I do agree that it isn’t really show
That seems very odd to me. My installs never got that bad. Not calling you a liar, just saying your out of the box experience was way shittier than mine.
Windows 8 marked the point in my opinion. It’s when they tried to start locking down the operating system and focusing heavily on the cloud. The adware began in this era as well.