This MakeUseOf article[/url] is a nice brief trip thru consumer Windows versions, except for Win2000.
What’s your Windows history?
I started daily PC use in ’85 at work, and got my first home machine in ’90—a real 386 screamer with 8Mb RAM, a steal for £3,200 with the employee discount at the computer company where I worked. I’ve built my own PCs since ’99.
3.0
…was my first Windows in ’91. I gave up on its 2-3 daily crashes after a few months, and went back to the excellent XTree Gold—but I was sold on the WIMP overlay idea. [Window, Icon, Mouse, Pointer]
3.1
…in ’92 was more stable, I jumped on and have stayed in the Windows saddle since. I didn’t like the arrival of the Registry—I still like editable INIs—but 386 Enhanced Mode made up for it.
Win95
…I loved. The desktop & taskbar nailed the GUI core, but biggest of all for me was long file names. Hallelujah.doc!
98 & 98SE
…I recall only Internet Connection Sharing, and DirectX becoming good.
ME
…I skipped due to bad reaction in tech land.
2000
…is an unsung hero imo. It married the friendly interface of 9X with the stability of NT, and in my 3 years’ usage was better than the first 2 years of the great XP. Among lots of improvements & extras, I recall significantly better Plug & Play, MS Management Console, SFC & Event Viewer.
XP
…became great after a bad first year—I jumped on after over a year when SP1 got good reports. Stable & reliable, its main weakness was security.
Vista
…I also skipped due to bad reaction in tech land.
Win7
…is the only version I bought pre-launch—MS ran a 3 for $150 offer which I grabbed due to the many favorable reports about the beta versions. I loved it from the outset, with taskbar pinning and Jump Lists, window snapping & Libraries, Windows Defender & MSE, and good SSD support.
Win7 was so good that it didn’t need a Service Pack—the eventual SP1 was a roll-up rather than significant update. Great out of the gate, the best Windows so far imo.
Win8
…I again skipped due to bad reaction in tech land & I didn’t go for 8.1 because Win7 was so good. Less said about 8RT, the better.
Win10
…I accepted the free upgrade close to the 12-month deadline, after reading that many of the initial teething problems had been resolved or minimized. It was a marriage of Win7’s usability & Win8’s security, and was decent enough from the start—although it took me a month to settle it down, and my much better half couldn’t get it working on her new PC [the Dell Aurora in my sig, which I swapped my self-built for so she could have a usable PC].
I played with the tiled start screen—interesting, nice effort but not for me. The Start Menu is really poor imo. The Control Panel > Settings migration is messy for now. Significant improvement for gaming—better backwards compatibility than Win7, strong DirectX 12, ability to record play in background.
I’m all in favor of the strategic sense behind Win10—stop having to support multiple old OSs & put all the effort into one universal one. I also like the 6-monthly big updates, and the way MS is now handling their roll-out via the Insider program & the staggered releases.
MS has made a few missteps—eg forcing updates, messing with Cortana-Edge-Bing integration, native apps difficult to uninstall, poor MS Store, resetting privacy settings—but overall 10 is the right way to go and is a good OS.
Conclusion
Best: 7 & 95
Honorable Mention: 3.1, 2000, XP, 10
Okay: 98, 98SE, 8.1
Bad: 3.0, ME, Vista, 8
What do you think, especially about Win10’s direction?
Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD
