Windows version with best icon/graphic style

[ZortMcGort11]

I don't care what the mob thinks, pal.

[Jody Thornton]

Uh, I was trying to be friendly and definitely I'm not adheriong to mob mentality. But are you saying that you'd even ignore Micorosoft's own admission that ME had problems? I'm not saying don't be happy using it, but you seem really cheesed that other users had legitimate issues with the OS. That's not the users' faults, is it?

[ROTS]

ME graphics and sounds, but going further back, things seems decent enough.

98 is always a crowd pleaser, because it had all those themes.

Of course 95 had Bob fedora GUI, which came in various HP or Compaq ( I forget which one ) machines. I remember those days when using the 95 machines felt like using the OSX machines, and was a magical experience.

Windows XP was probably the most terrible in your face GUI, but it is more sustainable then Vista with the right tweaks.

What I really would like to know who are the people who worked on most of the icons.

Windows 7, 8, etc all feel lost.

[ZortMcGort11]

Sorry I was rude to you Jody T.... I was in a real bad mood yesterday.

You're points are correct. I shouldn't dismiss other folks legitimate grievances with Windows ME. Oh well... nothing I can do about that now.

I feel lost on newer stuff. I used "some" version of Office at a printing shop while doing a resume... couldn't figure out what the hieroglyphics did. I thought Word 6 on Windows 3.1 was sufficient. Maybe I'm behind the times.

[Jody Thornton]

Oh I get the gripes with Office. See, I detest the ribbon interface, so I don't ever want to upgrade past my current Office 2003 installation. Office 2007/2010/2013 leave me cold. And the Office365 initiative is not attractive to me at all.

In fact, I would stay with Office 2003 if it weren't for security issues not being patched or maintained past April 2014. I have a REALLY nice system right now 7 GB of RAM, XP x64 Edition and Office/Outlook 2003. It works flawlessly.

You made me think of Word v6 with fond memories. When I first used Windows 95, I ran Office v4.3 (16-bit) and used LFNs Now! to get long filenames to work with the old apps. I miss those simple days.

[RacerBG]

Vista is my choice.

[j7n]

Windows 98/ME/2000 had the same icons. In addition from the base icons carried over from Win98, like computer, folder, explorer and desktop, ME had a range of new "multimedia" ones, like scanner and my pictures, following the very same style. ME and 2000 has more in common graphically than ME with 98. I prefer the 98's icons, but 2000's blue color scheme, and in particular the Tahoma font. MS Sans Serif looks rough and unfinished in comparison.

"Themes" are a distinctly separate product. But the 9x themes were alright too. One could easily tell what the objects represented on those icons were meant to be.

The XP style icons (including Office 2003) lacked definition, and were legible only on ultra sharp LCDs, which at the time when XP came out the majority of people didn't have.

Beginning with XP, icons also started to grow in unreasonable size wasting precious memory. Windows 98 had the largest icons as 48*48*256 (10 kB per icon), enough to display on the XP "tile" view. A large part of XP's shell32.dll is huge icons (30 kB), and some 3rd party applications like Nero had 256 pixel true color icons (512 kB for one icon), prompting UpdatePack.NL's "lite" releases to edit them out to keep the exectutable sizes in check. This nonsense was started by Windows XP and continued by Vista, which added support for those sizes. I suppose it is impossible to have photographic icons at low resolution, but I would argue that "drawn" style is most appropriate for an icon anyway.

This XP graphical refreshment, including blurred icons and the Luna theme, was the worst addition they made to Windows NT 5 (2000), which makes me reluctant to describe XP as the best system. A footnote seems required, describing that I am really talking about NT 5.

Windows Seven icons once again regained definition through darkened borders for most shapes. I've not looked at Windows Eight (2012) much. What I saw was totally flat. The system for some reason treats the screen as if it was a printed sheet, where only simple vector shapes can be output. But it will pass. Styles will change, and Metro will be rendered obsolete and denounced. Just wait and see.

Edited April 11, 2014 by j7n

[Flasche]

Windows Me has amazing sounds, but I like vista's design. The eye candy possesses me

[legacyfan]

i pick vista the way it looks is cool and fast and it does not have telemetry

Edited March 21, 2021 by VistaEX

[Hyper.nl]

Vista without any doubt.