News - Microsoft Windows is 30 years old

[HEXUS]

First release required 192KB of RAM and two floppy disk drives.

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[Saracen]

And it's a shame that having finally just about got it right with Win 7, they then had to go and right royally bollix it up again with the W8 UI.

All IMHO, of course.

[loyal986]

Awww old memories, I liked windows 3.0 used to paint and game on it

[scaryjim]

Still reckon the best desktop version was 2000 personally, although Win 7 is pretty damn close too.

I was so sad when my 2000 install CD finally delaminated

[kingpotnoodle]

With the exception of ME (should have been killed in favour of 2000) and Vista (too late, too different without enough testing at launch) I've thought all versions of Windows offered solid progress in the general right directions... funny to think it's younger than me though, how the world changes.

I like 8, 8.1 and look forward to 9... I'd just like them to bundle Stardocks Modern Mix like functionality so I don't have to go full screen for MUI apps (and settings) when I'm otherwise in desktop mode.

Happy Birthday Windows, don't get drunk and "network" with OS-X in the pub car park...

[Irien]

I'm always surprised that no-one seems to notice that Windows releases follow the same trend as Star Trek movies - good, bad, good, bad and so on (or vice versa). Whilst it might be stretching things a bit - Win 1 (iffy), Win2 (better), Win3 (iffy), Win3.1(1) (good), Win95 (iffy), 95-OSR2 (usb, TCP/IP, internet etc) (better), 98 (iffy), 98SE good, ME (bad), XP (good), vista (bad), Win7 (good), Win8 (poor), 8.1 (well, there's an exception to every rule, right?)

Of course, you gotta fit NT4 and Win2k in there somewhere which probably breaks things, but it
does seem like something of a trend

[watercooled]

Yep I've definitely noticed that trend too. Win 8.1 doesn't necessarily break the rule if you consider it a service pack, which it essentially is with a bit of fancy marketing probably intended to get people who deliberately skipped 8 to give it another chance.

Also I didn't consider Vista *that* bad; sure it was quite different on the surface, but for the most part stuff still kind of worked correctly, things still happened predictably, and they added some seriously long-overdue upgrades to the OS, notably the security system. Unfortunately they did make it a bit obtrusive to the point you had idiots claiming to be pros going around recommending people disable it completely, their reasoning being 'if you can click it, so can a virus', clearly demonstrating they had no clue how it worked. /rant

[zdn1042]

^ So judging from that logic, Windows 9 should be a good one. Hehe.

[LSG501]

I look at the picture of windows 1.0 and all I see are early versions of windows 7 and 8 without the 'polish' lol

I switched from xp to vista nearly on release, can't say I have that bad a memory of it compared with xp, you just had to 'understand' why your memory was always full lol

Seeing as it has the foundation code' of win 7 and 8, it can't have been that bad

[cheesemp]

Problem with Vista was RAM! It didn't work well unless you had at least 2Gb. I saw plenty of Vista laptops with 512Mb - They where awful - slow and unresponsive. Also SP1 helped a lot. Still really glad to get Win7!

[DeAnt28790]

Can someone please explain why exactly windows 8 is bad? People don't like the interface? Please explain how the MUI is worse than the start menu. It runs stable, it runs faster and it uses less resources. Yes that sounds awful!

[3dcandy]

Because it's such a change, and most people loathe change DeAnt

[McEwin]

Can someone please explain why exactly windows 8 is bad? People don't like the interface? Please explain how the MUI is worse than the start menu. It runs stable, it runs faster and it uses less resources. Yes that sounds awful!

The problem I have with it is that they have taken away the access points to most of the functionality, changed how the UI works and appears to have inconsistent menus. What replaces it is not intuitive and there is no help/pointers. My girlfriend (who is what I call an average user) hates it too. And judging by your comment and what I've seen and the fact Microsoft has done a U-turn seems to suggest that's the popular opinion!

[simonpreston]

Windows 8 isn't bad. But, as Facebook has demonstrated numerous times, when you radically change something people are used to they instantly hate it (but they also come round to it later on to the point they wonder what they were moaning about). Still, I still have Start8 on both my 8.1 machines and have the choice of using either (which is something MS should have done). Personal opinion is that I have no real need for the new Start Screen on a desktop where the old system worked just fine but it doesn't make 8/8.1 a bad OS at all, just different.

Vista was poor from the start. It also didn't help that Microsoft backported many of it's features in to XP SP2, which diminished the need for it. By SP2 they had fixed a lot of it's issues but it was far too late by that point. Having said that, I was running a Vista SP2 install on a Core 2 Duo rig with 2GB and it still wasn't perfect. The hard drive would grind for up to an hour after powering up which made it sometimes a pain for it to use until it was properly ready.

I ran ME for about 2 weeks before I replaced it with Windows 2000. The former was horrible. Constant crashes, hangs, freezing - unusable. The latter was such a polar opposite. It was a joy to use. Stable, reliable and had so many excellent built in features which just made user and network management so much better. None of my Windows 9x/Me install CDs ever saw the light of day again. Windows 7 is the only other MS OS that has had me go 'Wow... this is actually brilliant!' Even when running the betas 7 was already looking to be a great OS and it was. Didn't even need a service pack fix it - it was just good from the off.

XP... just an 'enhanced' looking version of 2000 really. Well, if you liked that horrible default theme. Royale Noir was much nicer. XP SP2 probably should have been released as a new OS but instead we got it all for free... which was nice.

[watercooled]

Problem with Vista was RAM! It didn't work well unless you had at least 2Gb. I saw plenty of Vista laptops with 512Mb - They where awful - slow and unresponsive.

Oh yeah I'd almost forgotten about that part. :/ TBF though XP started to chomp through the memory with all of the updates and service packs; I remember it running OK on, and often shipping with, 128MB on release - 512MB was barely enough with SP3. Of course, updates still have a nasty habit of eating up far more HDD space than they have any right to, but that's a different matter...

As for why 8 is awful, have you been living in a cave? Of course, not everyone dislikes it, but from what I've seen there are certain points a lot of people agree on. And I'm not just immediately against change; Vista was a change, and aside from some of the problems it brought with it, I didn't at all mind it. 8 is just bad. I don't care if it's stable, it's just consistently bad then.

And I don't necessarily agree it's faster or lighter on resources - a load of points MS made about speed are frankly marketing BS, for example I kept seeing something along the lines of '8 boots so fast we had to artificially delay it so people could enter the BIOS' - which clearly shows a complete lack of understanding of how a PC works, considering POST (and therefore time to enter BIOS setup) is entirely independent from the OS.

I tried 8 quite early on, before it was popular to hate it, and I took an immediate dislike to it (I've gone into reasons plenty of times before, so I can't really be bothered going over the not-insignificant list of issues again). I persisted to allow myself to adjust, and just found myself just finding more reasons to dislike it as I continued to use it. During my time using it I didn't observe what I'd consider lower resource usage, and it didn't feel remotely faster/more responsive.

[watercooled]

Windows 8 isn't bad. But, as Facebook has demonstrated numerous times, when you radically change something people are used to they instantly hate it (but they also come round to it later on to the point they wonder what they were moaning about). Still, I still have Start8 on both my 8.1 machines and have the choice of using either (which is something MS should have done). Personal opinion is that I have no real need for the new Start Screen on a desktop where the old system worked just fine but it doesn't make 8/8.1 a bad OS at all, just different.

Again, you can't just dismiss everyone's opinion of something as dislike of change.

The hard drive would grind for up to an hour after powering up which made it sometimes a pain for it to use until it was properly ready.

I never experienced that problem. Perhaps it was indexing on a fresh install? In which case it was lowest priority and wouldn't have slowed any usage.

Windows 7 is the only other MS OS that has had me go 'Wow... this is actually brilliant!' Even when running the betas 7 was already looking to be a great OS and it was. Didn't even need a service pack fix it - it was just good from the off.

I also took to 7 from the RC, and used that as my main OS, although it did cause semi-frequent BSODs. That stopped with the final release though, and £50 was a reasonable preorder price.

XP... just an 'enhanced' looking version of 2000 really. Well, if you liked that horrible default theme. Royale Noir was much nicer. XP SP2 probably should have been released as a new OS but instead we got it all for free... which was nice.

I personally don't think forcing people to pay for essential updates to fix critical problems is remotely reasonable.