The actual reason Windows 11 failed

[D.Draker]

Oh, I forgot to answer to the main question, The actual reason Windows 11 had failed is because @D.Draker purchased zero licences, whereas with Vista he bought dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds.

Literally every PC I bought had Vista, and if we count the numerous gifts I made during that times, countless girlfriends were gifted with Vista computers, even my mother and father!

[vinifera]

just shows your ignorance what was behind longhorn

and fyi spying started with xp

[NotHereToPlayGames]

Dig deeper.  Windows 2000 "collected basic system information for diagnostic and security purposes".  By definition, that "collection" is a form of 'spying' (by today's standards if not by then-standards).

[D.Draker]

23 hours ago, vinifera said:

just shows your ignorance what was behind longhorn

You know what, you're absoluteness right! Despite being on Millennium for a long time, I paid very little attention to the primitive operating systems before Vista, those were designed for office slaves to serve as a calculator.

Son, we have different priorities in life, it's very obvious. For me, life is all about fun and entertainment, so I chose the only one really high quality media capable OS - Vista.

Windows 7/8 took a huge step back in the quality, and Windows 11 is the icon of primitivism.

[D.Draker]

23 hours ago, vinifera said:

and fyi spying started with xp

You mean Alexa, not relevant 'cause I always used Opera. And I skipped XP. (used only a brief time), and it was a terrible experience, similar to 11.

But my grandmother, born in the very beginning of the 20th century, liked it. 1912-1913 smth, I don''t already remember.

I wonder what would she tell about 11!?!??!

[vinifera]

On 3/4/2025 at 6:19 PM, NotHereToPlayGames said:

Dig deeper.  Windows 2000 "collected basic system information for diagnostic and security purposes".  By definition, that "collection" is a form of 'spying' (by today's standards if not by then-standards).

yeah but like XP you had to agree to it (might be wrong about 2k can't remember much of it)
office also spyed on you but again only if you "agreed" to it for their "improvement program" (or whatever it was called back then)

Edited March 5 by vinifera

[cc333]

I like how XP can be "tamed" and with a few simple settings, the whole "fisher-price" theme can be disabled, after which it looks and feels basically like an upgraded version of Windows 2000, especially before SP2.

c

[D.Draker]

A very good idea, but what to do with XP sound quality, which will still remain awful, cheaply sounding resampled 48Khz, very similar to mp3 128kb?

No matter how many pro grade sound cards I tried, all was terrible until NT6.0, and then got downhill with the release of Windows 7, going further donm with 8 and 10.

How's the sound in 11? My cards have no drivers for 11.

[cc333]

22 hours ago, D.Draker said:

A very good idea, but what to do with XP sound quality, which will still remain awful, cheaply sounding resampled 48Khz, very similar to mp3 128kb?

That's strange.  I've never had any trouble with sound on XP.  All cards I've tried function as they should, and I could set 44.1kHz (or any other supported sample rate) easily.  Of course, I've often used USB or Firewire (IEEE1394) audio interfaces with ASIO support for top sound quality, and they usually include decent drivers;  in my experience, I've found that virtually all of the so-called "HD" sound systems built into most XP-era motherboards have stupidly bloated and half-broken drivers and often are hideously noisy and cheap sounding regardless of driver or Windows version (if anything, newer Windows versions with newer drivers sound worse as the already mediocre support the bad drivers have deteriorates further).

Perhaps your drivers weren't fully compatible or something was wrong with your sound card?

c

Edited April 7 by cc333

[D.Draker]

13 hours ago, cc333 said:

That's strange.  I've never had any trouble with sound on XP.  All cards I've tried function as they should, and I could set 44.1kHz (or any other supported sample rate) easily.  Of course, I've often used USB or Firewire (IEEE1394) audio interfaces with ASIO support for top sound quality, and they usually include decent drivers;  in my experience, I've found that virtually all of the so-called "HD" sound systems built into most XP-era motherboards have stupidly bloated and half-broken drivers and often are hideously noisy and cheap sounding regardless of driver or Windows version (if anything, newer Windows versions with newer drivers sound worse as the already mediocre support the bad drivers have deteriorates further).

Perhaps your drivers weren't fully compatible or something was wrong with your sound card?

c

I used the drivers that came with the Xonar CD (which contained both Xp and Vista), but obviously not 11, hence I don't know and can't make judgements about 11.

At that time, I had just D1, but later upgraded to the more advanced Xonar D2, The sound on Vista was fantastic, on XP and 7, very similar to what we were listening in the 80's terrible cassette walkmans. or similar to the garbage mp3.

On Vista, I always choose 192Khz, of course not 44, and 44 is more like for partially deaf people, the ones who have nothing to lose in the terms of quality anyways.

I served in the artillery, my hearing is damaged, and even I hear the clear difference in favour of Vista.

[cc333]

Hmm, how fascinating.

It must be something about your specific hardware that only works best on Vista, and malfunctions (and sounds bad) on any other version.

My hearing is fairly good, and I still can't really tell the difference between 44.1 and 96 or 192, so I just go with 44.1 to save on disk space.

MP3 at the highest possible bitrate (320) is tolerable, I find, but once it starts dropping below 192, it becomes increasingly awful.  My preference, of course, is uncompressed WAV or AIFF (I guess FLAC is supposed to be good, but I tend not to use it much because support for it isn't as universal as it is for MP3 and WAV).

c

Edited April 8 by cc333

[D.Draker]

18 hours ago, cc333 said:

Hmm, how fascinating.

It must be something about your specific hardware that only works best on Vista, and malfunctions (and sounds bad) on any other version.

Thanks.

No, I have lots and lots of different hardware. Windows 7 sound is the worst, sandy, Win 8 is soooo soft, like Sony HiFi audio (if you remember the late 70s-80s, of course, you'll understand). XP isn't far away from 7, a bit punchier, but also over-bassy and flat (poor surround), like they smash you straight in the face. But if you listen to CDs with their 16bit primitivism and over-loaded, highly compressed to the "brick wall" audio, which totally suck in the first place, probably you won't notice.

Edit:

Read about loudness wars, and even if a CD is properly mastered, 16bit is still not enough. It's 60s tech. 

Edited April 8 by D.Draker

[j7n]

Wait until some years pass, and people will remember how great Windows 11 was in comparison to what will be current then. Look how people say Vista, Millennium or Metro weren't that bad. You have no choice but to be assimilated.

The "fluent" Web UI of normal applications is a resource hog and definitely creates obsolescence. You also have to have a big screen to see enough content. It also makes the computer look like an "app" to which I am a guest.

More of your snobbery, which is off-topic. Windows WDM uses cubic resampling, which is fast and good enough. The artifacts of full band resampling sound nothing like mp3. Where you would notice a difference is in old games that used low sampling rates and would appear muffled and brickwalled with the better resampling algorithms. A common rate is needed to mix the output of multiple applications. Video content comes in 48 kHz, and multichannel downmixing to stereo in XP only works when the system's rate matches. Simple non-professional sound cards internally run at 48 kHz. You can always pick a professional sound card like an E-MU model with excellent support under XP (sans PAE) and use the ASIO interface, which bypasses Windows.

Windows NT 6 introduced the audiodg process and WASAPI that caused crackling on some systems. They have a special priority allocation to make it work smoothly. XP's sound is in kernel drivers and is uninterruptible. There was actually a KB2653312 patch to make the now legacy Wave API in Windows Seven use a better resampling rather than whatever poor choice was the default.

[Karla Sleutel]

18 hours ago, j7n said:

KB2653312 patch to make the now legacy Wave API in Windows Seven

18 hours ago, j7n said:

More of your snobbery, which is off-topic.

There's no such update in MS catalogue. Are you sure???

https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB2653312

Not off-topic, we all are very interested in the sound quality if Windows 11, but no one posted, so we can't (as of yet) determine whether it added up or contributed to the claimed (alleged) failure.

I'm also an owner of a very good card (shown at my profile, first post I think). But the description and my impressions were deleted by the supervisor.

[g_m_1990_]

Ah... Windows Me. Actually, I don't hate it... It's just a 9x system coated with 2000 UI. Several relatives of mine in my home country used to have rigs with Windows Me back in the old days. Didn't hear too many complaints from them. Probably their rigs were new ones, not upgrades from Windows 98.

My understanding was that Windows Me played a role as a "Home Edition" client, on par with the 2000 Professional client and the 2000 Server. M$ wasn't too confident about NT kernel at that time, so they rushed to make a product like that to somehow retain a partial MS-DOS compatibility (plus, MS-DOS 8.0 serves a recovery mode) and force users to use Win32 programs, like browsing the Internet, using Movie Maker, and playing DirectX / OpenGL games. It has a bunch of USB drivers built in, so one doesn't have to use that 8cm driver CD that comes with the thumb drive to make the drive work.

There were attempts (tutorial available on YouTube) to make MS-DOS 8.0 functional (not just boot into real DOS mode), just as Windows 95/98 does, but I haven't tested those approaches and can't say if that is just as good as MS-DOS 7.

Fun fact: vanilla DOSBox (and probably an old version of DOSBox-X) works on Windows 9x, including Windows Me - A little bit of irony.

 

 

 

For Windows 11, in my mind, everything after Windows Vista is just Windows Vista R[insert a number]. I have to work, using a valid Windows license.