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Over the past summer, I set up a 6th gen-based Dell Optiplex with Windows 7, and that thing absolutely flies with a nice 1 TB SSD and 16 GB of RAM. I've been thinking of *gasp* upgrading it to 10, but, honestly, I don't really see any point to it other than curiosity. 7 is doing everything I want with no problems, and there's no reason to change it unless/until I encounter something I want to use that it can't run. If I had a spare SSD that I could swap in, maybe I would try 10, so that if I didn't like it (and I probably wouldn't), I could simply swap my undisturbed Windows 7 SSD back in and pick up where I left off. c

Neither do I! My favorite Windows is 95, followed by (in order from most to least): 98 SE, 2000, XP, and 7. I don't care much for 8.x, but I've found that with some effort, it can be rendered mostly sane. 10 is harder, and it has a tendency to self destruct, so I try to avoid it. Since I use Apple MacOS primarily, I don't need to bother with the latest Windows. 2018, I believe, was about when Google (I think) told everyone to mandate https and TLS1.2, among other things, and naturally most sites complied. This, of course, broke virtually all older browsers, which lack support for modern security protocols. A couple years later (2020) for similar reasons, MS began breaking Windows Update for older Windows, like 2000 and XP (via extraordinary measures, some degree of WU functionality remains, but stock WU is completely broken now). There's not much that cn be done about WU, but as for ancient browsers, if you set up a proxy that handles the security, things get better, but then they get choked up on the rampant javascript. If you strip that out too, you can still get a weirdly rendered, but somewhat usable page which is usually good enough for basic text. This can be fixed somewhat by web proxies that can reformat a page into something more usable that old browsers can render more or less correctly, but ultimately a current browser is needed for full functionality. c

Such a thing actually does exist. It's called Windows NT 4.0. However, Windows 2000, AKA NT 5.0, seems somewhat better because it still has a similar look and feel (although the "webbified" variant from 98), but includes many of the conveniences that are often taken for granted, such as Device Manager, Plug & Play, full support for USB HIDs (and at least partial support for USB mass storage), etc. NT 4 and earlier never had any of that. Of course, it follows that XP (NT 5.1-5.3) was the best Windows overall (and in my opinion still is, at least as far as the UI is concerned; there's a good reason why it outlasted every other version, having been continuously supported and updated in some form for almost 20 years!) because it took many of 2000's firsts and refined them with new features and even better reliability. 10 and 11 may have full support for modern hardware, but all that spyware junk is just unnecessary (I've read about how people were worried about all the spyware MS was including in Windows all the way back to Windows 98. If only they had known what was to come 15 years later, maybe they wouldn't have complained so much....) c

Wow! I've been out of the vintage Windows scene for awhile, and last I knew, the best, most "modern" browser was the Chinese Extreme360 that was hacked to display in English and remove all/most if the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) spyware and other similar junk. This Supermium, in principle, seems much better however, in the sense that it's a maintainable and reproducible port of Chromium, so the source code is available, unlike Extreme360, which is closed source. Last I knew, this was thought to be either impossible or prohibitively difficult, so I'm glad there was finally a breakthrough, as a native Chromium port seemed to be the most viable path forward, given that even the latest ports of the various Firefox-derived browsers have fallen increasingly out of date and/or are not working super reliably anymore as bugs and half-broken features begin to pile up. While in general I loathe to use Google Chrome and reluctantly use the open-sourced Chromium only when absolutely necessary, I will definitely consider giving Supermium a try, at least on my Windows XP, Vista and 7 machines. c

@66catsAll very good points. I'm not opposed to "reasonable" cuts to old hardware support, if doing so would guarantee that the OS will run reliably and have reasonable performance, even when running on the minimum supported configuration (95 on a 486, which I ran exactly once, is painfully slow even by late 90s-early 2000s standards, but usable once fully booted; I wouldn't want to try 98 or XP on a 486, though (XP can now be forced to run on 486, apparently, but it's almost useless for anything other than a proof of concept), especially with all the IE integration). It's the lack of support for otherwise perfectly fine hardware on account of a relatively minor technicality that comes across as kind of irksome. I didn't realize that Coffee Lake (8th gen) was from 2017 for some reason, so that helps somewhat. But what about 6th and 7th gen? They're not much older (2015 and 2016, respectively), are very similar architecturally to Coffee Lake, and 11 runs perfectly fine on them, yet both are officially unsupported and Windows refuses to install without workarounds. c

Yes, but consider the late 90s and 2000s, where new CPUs showed up regularly with all kinds of fancy new instructions. MS took advantage of many of these new instructions, and, yet, they were simultaneously able to retain compatibility with older CPUs that lacked the new instructions. What is so different between then and now? The fundamentals of how the x86 architecture works haven't changed that much, have they? I think that dumping compatibility with 2-4 year old hardware "for security reasons" is just an excuse to be lazy. They can absolutely make use of the new stuff and still retain compatibility with most of the old. They did that for years and it worked well enough. Yes, it would be unrealistic to maintain full compatibility with, say, the i386, or anything else that can't run at least 1 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, but they could certainly keep, at a minimum, higher-end Core2 Duos and all 1st gen Core i stuff (Nehalem and Westmere, etc). c

XP and its derivatives seem to be the cockroaches of the PC world, don't they? They won't die! c

My Windows 11 impressions so far are that most peoples' impressions of it aren't that great (I haven't used it myself, and probably won't any time soon). I waited 7 years for Windows 10 to get better — and it never really did, so I'm not waiting around for 11, because I doubt it'll ever get meaningfully better either. Microsoft simply doesn't seem to care anymore, so why should I? c

And Happy New Year! c

After some rigamarole (installing the official Update Rollup 1) and discovering that one must be using the newest release of the Legacy Update client (1.3 as of now; when I first tried it a week or two ago, 1.1 was current, so development is moving quite fast), I managed to update a fresh install of Windows 2000 SP4. I suspect this is the first time in quite awhile that it actually worked with such ease. Even when v6 was still fully online with SHA-1, updating a fresh install of 2000 was very hard because WU didn't work out of the box; I had to almost update everything just to make it work, but then what's the point? c

I tried Legacy Update, and I liked it. It worked more or less equivalently to the normal WUv6, but the sidebar and header were different, and overall the sidebar's UI feels a little unpolished compared to the old WU one, and the header is a bit large compared to the original. Because this is an open source project, perhaps it's possible to modify the header and sidebar to make them look and feel more true to the original. For now, however, I'm quite satisfied with its performance as is; it's functional and gets the job done. I know this isn't strictly relevant here, but I wonder if the same techniques used could enable a version based on WUv4 for use with Windows 9x and ME (and also unupdated 2000 pre-SP3 and XP RTM)? I suspect that it would be fairly trivial to get the front end working since v4 and v6 are fairly similar, but getting the back end going would be harder; any WUv4 workalike would need to be redirected to some sort of 9x update archive, since the original servers were purged of them years ago, and likely aren't even online anymore. c

I'm tired and depressed after yet another day of observing humanity's ineptitude and people's utter lack of concern for each other, so I won't go on much.... Re: EV vs. ICE: I don't know. I think maybe EVs ultimately aren't a terrible idea, but I agree wholeheartedly with many comments here that the available options leave much to be desired, create needless complications, and simply manufacturing them and their components (the plastics, the metals, and, most notably, the batteries) actually creates almost as much damage to the environment than driving around a 20+ year old gas/petrol powered car. I'm a little bit more positive about it, in that I don't think it's 100% about milking more money out of people, but I do believe that the current push, at least over here in California, USA, is severely misguided at best, because we have an old, outdated electric grid that isn't equipped to supply the kind of power output that several tens of millions of EVs would need, except perhaps in the major cities. What about all the people living in rural areas, though? Where I am now, every third car is an EV of some type, and those who own them have the money to not only buy the car, but to also upgrade their homes with a proper charging solution. Attempting to drive an EV in a mountainous rural area, while doable, isn't practical or financially sustainable by most; therefore, I don't think it's wise to force everyone to adopt them right now. In time, my hope is that the technology will improve, new methods of manufacturing will be invented that reduce the environmental impact, and the electric grid will be upgraded and rebuilt, but with all the political inertia and red tape, it's gonna take decades at best for all of these things to happen, and nobody seems to care. Hopefully when nuclear fusion power gets invented, things will improve. And now for electronics. Take cellular/mobile phones, for example. I like my iPhones, but it's gotten to a point now where every phone on the market is some kind of Apple (iOS) or Google (Android) based flat slab of glass or plastic with cameras galore. For years, I haven't really cared about the latest and greatest, preferring instead to use older phones, and to keep using them for longer than the average person might (we used TracFone (a US prepaid service) with a 2G phone until late 2013 or so, LONG after most everyone else I knew switched to an iPhone), because why upgrade if it still works? I mean, the main purpose is to I'd keep using my old Nokia 5190 or Motorola StarTAC indefinitely if I could, but as the 2G and 3G signals get shut down over here in the US, the situation is becoming increasingly bleak and depressing, because pretty soon, only brand new smartphones will work. The carriers all say they need to maximize capacity for the new hotness they call 5G, but I just don't buy it. 4G was plenty fast for my needs (I mean, even 3G is good enough for what I want to do; 2G is pushing it, but even that's still OK for the occasional email or something), so why do we need to keep making things faster? Did anybody actually ask for it? I didn't. And don't get me started on all this SaaS rentware garbage. And cryptographically locking down all aspects of the hardware architecture that rentware runs on is just wrong. I don't want to pay $1000 or more for a computer, only to be locked out by the manufacturer a year later when they decide to stop supplying OS updates because it's "too old". And when they inevitably say that the newer OS is safer, I cringe, because while there can be some genuine risks in high security settings, I feel that the average user need not care too much, as long as they practice good browsing habits and the software in question is updated enough to work with modern standards (I consider Windows XP to be the practical minimum here, with 7 being my preferred recommendation for those who aren't quite as technically minded, because XP requires a lot of hoop-jumping nowadays, whereas Windows 7, provided the hardware is compatible, still more or less works out of the box once updated a bit (and Spectre/Meltdown mitigations are disabled, because I think the danger of exploitation is mostly theoretical (and requires direct access to the hardware, if I'm remembering correctly), and thus in practice poses relatively little risk to the average home user). I developed a soft spot for Windows 8.1, because I could make it work and look mostly like 7 with some minor tweaks, but I avoid 10 like the plague because I don't like it. 11 is worse in this regard, and has rendered 100% of my hardware (some of which I've paid thousands of dollars for over the years) obsolete. Anyway, I guess I went on longer than I thought. Oh, well. Maybe someone, somewhere, sometime will invent a time machine that we can all use to go back in time to a point when the world as we know it seemed like a better place (for all its turmoil, I find that the bulk of the 20th century seems like a happier time than the 21st century has so far turned out to be (of course, looking back through modern history, few periods have been quite as thoroughly miserable as the past ten to twenty years have been). Sorry for rambling.... c

WU v4 was the XP styled one, wasn't it? I remember using it briefly in 2004 or so. Or was that v5? It's probably safe to say that v1 through v3 (the versions released with Windows 98 and ME) are pretty much extinct and thus un revivable, yes? c

Being a Mac user off and on since the 90s (and largely on for the past 10 years or so), this reminds me of the Mac OS X Public Beta, where Apple thought they'd try putting an ornamental, nonfunctional Apple logo in the top center of the menu bar, instead of a traditional Apple Menu (before Mac OS X, it was basically equivalent in concept to the Windows Start menu with some differences in execution) in the top left where it belongs. Needless to say, the criticism was fierce, so they reversed it and to this day, macOS still has an Apple menu in the top left (although since Mac OS X RTM (10.0), it doesn't function much like either the old Apple menu or the Start menu did at all, in that you can't add anything to it). Be that as it may, I feel like Apple in recent years has moved in a similar direction as MS, and I'm lagging behind at macOS 10.14 as a result, because in my opinion it is the last fairly hackable version (the OS has become increasingly locked down since then, and when run on Apple's M1 hardware, it's basically almost as locked down as iOS; I'll cut MS a little slack here in that at least there's still a freely viewable registry in which one can tweak otherwise hidden or inaccessible settings. At least for now...). Incidentally, after trying Windows 8.1 (and even 10 for a time), I have settled back to XP for doing tasks that are better suited to Windows, and 7 for the few of them that XP can't do. Since I use mostly macOS for modern stuff anyway, I have the freedom to stay with XP and 7 indefinitely if I want (so long as I have access to viable XP or 7-era hardware and/or continue to use an Intel-based computer that can run them in a VM), and if either one or both can no longer browse the internet, it'll be sad, but it won't much affect how I use them (this is especially true if they're running in VMs, as I can simply switch to the host OS to do anything they can't do). Anyway, this is a bit off topic in that I'm not discussing my impressions of Windows 11. The thing is, since I haven't used it, and probably never will (save for maybe a VM just to poke around in for curiosity's sake), I don't really have any reason to discuss it other than to say that, based on what I've read and heard from others who have tried it, I'm pretty much not going to bother, as it seems like it'd just be a waste of time (and besides, absolutely NONE of my computers are supported (my newest is Skylake-based), and even though the installer's CPU check is easily bypassed and there's no apparent negative effects from doing so, there's no guarantee that MS won't fix that loophole and make it harder). c

It feels like it's been ages since I've seen any activity here! I was starting to think that any effort to get Win98 onto the modern Internet had been abandoned, but it seems not, which is good! I just tried it (no VPN or anything), and, aside from being unable to read Polish, it downloaded fine. Why is it censored for @schwups? I'm in the US, so I'm probably somewhat naive regarding the intricacies of censorship (in my experience, internet censorship pretty much doesn't happen here except for a few highly specific cases, such as blatant fraud and copyright infringement/piracy). Anyway, I'm going to follow this thread, now that it seems to be active again c