In your opinion, what are the best/worst versions of Microsoft Windows?

[surrodox2001]

Best: Windows XP and 7

Worst: Windows ME and 8

 

I'm stretched between Best and Worst for Windows NT 3.x-4 since they've historical value but quite bare bones in terms of available software.

Edited October 24, 2020 by surrodox2001

[InterLinked]

7 hours ago, Anixx said:

Best quality: Windows 2000

Best improvement over previous version: Windows 95

Worst quality: Windows 10

Worst degradation over previous version: Windows Vista

I think you mean Windows 8 here

[Anixx]

1 hour ago, Dylan Cruz said:

I think you mean Windows 8 here

I never used Windows 8, but Windows 8.1 in many respects is better than Windows 7. If only not that Metro abomination, it otherwise has better quality than Windows 7. I currently use Windows 8.1. Of course it is worse than Windows Vista, but I would say, a bit better than Win 7. Win 7 was also a big fall in quality itself (after Vista), just not that epic as Vista compared to XP.

Edited October 24, 2020 by Anixx

[asdf2345]

14 hours ago, Jody Thornton said:

I used a theme editor to modify the background buttons and colours.  I can send it to you.  I use a few home-made modified themes.  I hate when background windows have no colour.

 

Send pls

[Jody Thornton]

51 minutes ago, asdf2345 said:

Send pls

Can I attach here?  Moderators: if I send a compressed file of themes and other support files, will that breach the rules of the board?

 

[asdf2345]

Just now, Jody Thornton said:

Can I attach here?  Moderators: if I send a compressed file of themes and other support files, will that breach the rules of the board?

 

DM me, also file attaching is kinda broken, or at least it is for me

(Max total size for me is 0.01MB)

[wimc]

21 hours ago, Dylan Cruz said:

Huh? Visual Basic 6? I don't think you need XP for that, I seem to recall installing it on Windows 7 at some point and W2K.

Yes I do, as Windows XP is the only version of Windows I'll ever have and use on a early 2000's (before 2002) computer. Back then, a college thing.

My primary computer was bought June 2020, as soon as I received it and was setup to use, installed Bodhi Linux to rid of Windows 10.

Edited October 24, 2020 by wimc
clarify some points

[win32]

1 hour ago, asdf2345 said:

DM me, also file attaching is kinda broken, or at least it is for me

(Max total size for me is 0.01MB)

You need to delete other attachments to free up space, or become a forum sponsor.

[Tripredacus]

On 10/24/2020 at 1:54 PM, Jody Thornton said:

Can I attach here?  Moderators: if I send a compressed file of themes and other support files, will that breach the rules of the board?

 

No problem with themes.

[Win10-Hater]

In my opinion, all Windows NT 6.x versions are the best Windows versions

By far, Vista is the best of all to me.

7 is also good but it ran a tad slower than Vista on my old but trusty Pentium D desktop (I wonder why).

Forget the Metro UI, everything else in W8 or 8.1 is very good . You can easily correct this using Classic Shell and themes, which is impossible with Windows 10 as it breaks themes with every update. (and sorry I made a voting mistake and voted for 8 as one of the worst)

I like Windows XP, but did not vote for it as its UI looks ancient and because you don't have any extended kernel. Same with Windows 2000, except for that extended kernel bit.

Now coming to the worst ones:

I hate Windows 10 for many reasons ( data collection, buggy and terrible quality updates, instability, unorganised mess of a UI, the list goes on....). LTSC fixes only half of the problems but the other half is left unaddressed. 

And Windows ME. Terrible, right from when I booted into it on my VBox vm. Is any further explanation really needed??

EDIT:Reivisited WinME and found out that on a proper, decent-specced system with all proper drivers, it ran buttery smooth.

 

Edited February 24, 2021 by Win10-Hater

[pridesnow]

IMHO, my top three favorite versions of Windows are Vista, 7 and XP. Vienna is most memorable to me because it was my first version of the operating system that came with a Packard Bell EasyNote LS11HR laptop (at that time, it was a very good laptop with 6 gigabytes of RAM, an i5 processor and some kind of video card by Radeon (or what), definitely not I remember, but the sites said that this is a gaming laptop). There were very good and pleasant times, as I remember all this with pleasure, nothing lagged, everything worked perfectly, and this interface... It hooked me with something. But this "something" keeps me still. But! Now you ask why I put Vista in the list of my favorite systems? Because I have been using it since 2017, and this is a cool thing that I will not reinstall for at least a few years, since I really love it, and with the release of the extended kernel from @win32, I definitely will not move until then, until the creator of this thing can, for some reason, add new functions, and the programs will no longer connect to servers or something else. Also, I really love her interface, it is even better than in 7, which I also love, and I will never forget, I just want stable work from my computer, and with Vista it became possible. Yes, I still have this laptop, it is running Windows 7, my dad uses it, since the discrete video card for some unknown reason stopped working, unfortunately. But now I use a computer with modest specifications, but they satisfy me: GTX660 Palit, Xeon E5440, 8GB DDR3. It works perfectly on this hardware. Also, I fell in love with XP, I used it until 2014-2016, then I moved, as mentioned, to Vista. I used it because it was very stable, and then it was just interesting for me to explore it, but yes, those were interesting times. Moving on to what I hate, it's 10. I used it for a few months, but then switched back to 7, but after a while already on Vista. I do not want to use 10, since it simply wastes my perfomance of pc to nowhere, for some unknown reason: 2-3 gigabytes of RAM, when on Vista there is only 1 gigabyte, I also don’t particularly like surveillance, which is very much on 10, ex. And I also just don't like the Metro interface, I don't like minimalism, it's just not mine

Edited November 28, 2020 by pridesnow

[j7n]

I would vote for the group of Windows 2000/XP/2003 as the same product. Not sure why 2003 is mixed with 64-bit, when the later was not so good due to poor support. I didn't welcome the additions to XP, such as the visual style and system restore. But those parts can be disabled or removed, with less effort than required for later Microsoft products. XP has had a much longer useful life than any other version, and well worth the disadvantages. "Extended kernels" do not count towards the above OS, if they copy libraries from later products, as is the case with the BWC and OneCore.

I cannot accept the increased system requirements of Vista for a marginal improvement at best over the predecessor. Nothing comparable to switching from DOS to NT. And I recall that some components actually performed much worse, such as the new network stack, event viewer, certain file copy operations, leaks with entercriticalsection. Sure, it may work acceptably given a sufficiently capable computer, but the purpose of a computer is not to run Windows, but to be useful for an application. This inefficiency is worse than user interface changes. NT 6.2 is the second worst product, with the disastrous flat visual design on top of the already increased memory footprint.

Out of the box NT 6.0 seems better than NT 6.1 to me, as it can be customized to more closely resemble previous versions. But again, the lifespan of Seven/R2 trumps that.

[asdf2345]

1 hour ago, j7n said:

I would vote for the group of Windows 2000/XP/2003 as the same product. Not sure why 2003 is mixed with 64-bit, when the later was not so good due to poor support. I didn't welcome the additions to XP, such as the visual style and system restore. But those parts can be disabled or removed, with less effort than required for later Microsoft products. XP has had a much longer useful life than any other version, and well worth the disadvantages. "Extended kernels" do not count towards the above OS, if they copy libraries from later products, as is the case with the BWC and OneCore.

I cannot accept the increased system requirements of Vista for a marginal improvement at best over the predecessor. Nothing comparable to switching from DOS to NT. And I recall that some components actually performed much worse, such as the new network stack, event viewer, certain file copy operations, leaks with entercriticalsection. Sure, it may work acceptably given a sufficiently capable computer, but the purpose of a computer is not to run Windows, but to be useful for an application. This inefficiency is worse than user interface changes. NT 6.2 is the second worst product, with the disastrous flat visual design on top of the already increased memory footprint.

Out of the box NT 6.0 seems better than NT 6.1 to me, as it can be customized to more closely resemble previous versions. But again, the lifespan of Seven/R2 trumps that.

If you like efficiency, NT 6.2 is actually the best of modern Windows

[xpclient]

Best: XP or 7/8.1 with Winaero Tweaker, 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, Classic Shell, VistaSwitcher, OldNewExplorer

Worst: 10 but Winaero Tweaker, 7+TT, Classic Shell, VistaSwitcher and StartIsBack++, OldNewExplorer make it tolerable

[InterLinked]

On 6/29/2020 at 1:33 PM, Tommy said:

I personally always preferred the classic theme UI. It's fast, snappy, and to me looks cool. The fact that Windows 10 removed it all together just makes me a bit disgusted. I don't really like the entirely flat look in the UI. But so many things have followed that trend as far as logos go, Google even being one of them.

I think that was removed in Windows 8 actually, if we are talkin natively.

On 6/29/2020 at 1:33 PM, Tommy said:

A bit of why I don't care for Windows 10's UI also stems from the fact that we use it at work and for the older people who don't get on the computer much but needs to in order to request time off or look at the pay stubs...I always have to tell them how to navigate. One question I have is...what was wrong with the Windows 98 styled start menu? Or really, the 9x/NT4/2000 styled one? With Windows 10, I discovered that you can log off by right clicking the start menu flag and choosing shut down or sign off. Most of the others that help people when I can't tell them to click on the start menu and then click on the little person looking icon and then signing off. Why does something simple like that have to be tucked away? I liked when you'd click on Start (can you truly even call it a "start" menu anymore?) I guess it does say "Start" when you hover over the flag. But you'd click on it and you had actual text of what each option did. Shut down...log off...help....search...etc. I can't completely knock Windows alone because most software developers are moving towards picture only icons. Remember the older IE versions? Back, Forward, Stop, all of those were listed under the respective icon buttons. Now you don't get any of that. Now you have to tell someone to click on the little house icon if you want them to visit their homepage. It's so frustrating because not everyone understands these types of terms.

I also don't care for the "other user" option on Windows 10. I can't speak for Windows 8 but especially on Windows 2000/XP, I preferred always being able to type in your username and password instead of bringing up the last user like Windows 10 seems to do. That throws people for a loop too, more than you know. I liked the CTRL+ALT+DEL to log in which it is obviously capable of doing if enabled...but then you just had a popup window asking for your credentials. Easy peasy! Then again, these are people who complain about having to change their password every year as they finally got this one down pat.

 

What you described is possible in literally EVERY version of Windows NT. On every version I have ever used, Windows 2000 through Windows 10, I always require CTRL + ALT + DEL and typing and the username and password.

The "other user" thing in Windows 10 IS stupid but it's not like it doesn't let you do that.

I have noticed it's almost impossible to distinguish a locked computer from one that is logged on. Maybe impossible, actually. Often on Windows 10, I'll start typing my password in the username box, thinking I just locked the computer, nope, I just booted it up. I *NEVER* made that mistake <= Windows 7. It was always very clear what the current state of the computer was.

Windows 10 is just a disaster on so many levels.

 

On 6/29/2020 at 1:33 PM, Tommy said:

Now...for a company like Meijer which I work for...for those who don't know, it's basically a supermarket like Walmart but is privately owned and only in 6 states right now. But they're in a bit of a pickle and have things set up so archaically because many of their training modules use Flash which is obviously going away.

 

It's a complete joke, so many sites still use flash. I will be downloading the latest version on 12/31 and blocking the Windows update that removes Flash from IE.

 

On 6/29/2020 at 1:33 PM, Tommy said:

Many things we use also rely on Internet Explorer. So for most things, we have to use IE but then for training, we have to switch to Google Chrome. Some want to use Chrome for everything but that's not possible as some things are broken in Chrome and don't function properly in it. We did use Windows 7 before it was retired and that was set up a bit differently as they had Flash for IE installed but then they had removed it about a year before we moved to new computers with Windows 10 on them. I did prefer Windows 7 only because it was a bit more configurable and they had a generic user account rather than utilizing our own accounts like we do on Windows 10.

 

I don't think has anything to do with Windows 7 vs. Windows 10 at all.

 

On 6/29/2020 at 1:33 PM, Tommy said:

We're still using Windows Server 2008 R2 for Citrix and I'm sure other things so I'm assuming that they're receiving custom support for it. But I am a bit concerned with how some of these things are going to measure up, especially when Flash goes away. I really don't think there was a lot of planning ahead for these things. I know I'm sort of straying away from the actual OS discussion but so much of this ties into the poor planning of deployment and maintaining which I'm certain also isn't being done. When we got these new computers, they weren't too bad. They use Ryzen 5 processors and have 8GBs of RAM installed...but they're slowing down so much already that people are complaining quite a bit. What also gets me is they're still using Windows 10 version 1803 which has this problem we've dubbed as the black screen of death, where the screen goes black randomly for no seemingly good reason and even though the computer hasn't crashed, you can't see a thing and the only thing you can do is hold the power button down and restart the computer. Horrible when you're in the middle of working on something! When you head over to the 1XBET Casino, there is a promo code that has to be used to get the welcome offer of up to €1500 with 150 free spins also being given. 1xbet promo code free spins and 1xBet members can activate the bonus code in their account. 1XBET Exclusive Casino Bonus: Up to €1950 and 150 free spins. Establishing sports betting and online casino games since 2007, 1xBet is a great option to play for real money.

But to really cut to the chase, I'd be all for a new version of Windows that was designed for real simplicity. For those like me who preferred Windows 98 and didn't care how "modern" it looks. Straight-forward and functional are good enough for me. While Windows 7 was probably the best OS Microsoft cranked out for a while and is probably the best of the NT 6.0 line...even it wasn't 100% straight-forward as previous versions. Windows 95 was probably a hallmark staple in the Windows series because of how much more straight-forward it was to use. No guessing what buttons did, it just told you in the UI. The OS/UI didn't assume that every person on the planet who uses that software knew what the picture icons meant. While I've figured most of them out, I'm a guru who works with this stuff day in and day out so I get it. But for those who don't use computers very much or have a hard time with them, MS needs to either have an option or a separate version of Windows that could be inter-compatible with updates but go back to some of the original Windows 95 roots that also maintains security and integrity of Windows NT. And of course, not completely forcing updates and restarts whenever the OS feels like it.

And honestly, as I mentioned up above...why does the OS have to be so large in filesize now? Many have been able to whittle down the OS to much smaller sizes which means lower overhead and most likely speeding up the OS itself. Even powerful PCs can start stumbling the more the OS is patched and the size continues to increase.

Yeah, it's amazing how Windows 2000 is so speedy compared to every other version of Windows NT out there, including XP. Seriously, every time I use it, I just say WOW. Everything is just instantaneous.

With the Windows 2000 extended kernel and some custom DLL patches thanks to @win32, I think that's as close as you'll get. It can run most modern programs that can run on XP, so you're pretty good there.