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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I still think that Windows NT 4 was the best Windows OS ever. And may be the best GUI ever. I always switch to classic theme, if I have to use Windows. In last versions it's not very classic, though.

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For me, it was W2K. It has the stability of NT series better usability, drivers and it was quite fast. Windows XP made simple things a lot harder and slower :)

2k was the first Windows version I remember that I didn't have to reboot daily. In my first proper job (a web developer, in 2000, writing what you'd now call 'single page applications' in DHTML) I'd go home at night and not even log out. The next day, it'd be waiting for me. At most I'd reboot weekly.

I also loved the workstation-y, crisp UI that would let me drag a window with its contents around the screen. My computer wasn't even all that powerful by the standards of the time.

Yep. Win 2k will always hold a place in my heart. My family bought a computer that came with Windows ME, and of course it crashed constantly. After getting incredibly frustrated with this my friend had a copy of this bizarre OS called Windows 2000. It took a long time to get all the drivers for everything initially, but it was stable. Damn stable.

I honestly had a server running Windows 2000 untill about 4 years ago. In that time, it was only really rebooted for system updates. It's sitting in my spare room.

I always liked 2k as well, and it was a good halfway point if you wanted to play games on Windows but not be stuck with a completely crap OS. It was relatively stable, as anyone who also admin'd Unix/Linux boxes at the time could tell you. It crashed just infrequently enough to be forgivable, which was a new thing for MS in my experience (Win 95c was a not-so-close second).

I remember having competitions with classmates and such with several hundred days of uptime on Win2k :). We were rather chuffed with ourselves at the time. Those were the days.

As someone who traditionally has not been a Windows user, W2K is by far my favorite Windows release (7 is probably second). When I was young my house had a Win98SE box that crashed constantly and loved to run ScanDisk at startup. Updating it to Windows 2000 was nothin short of a revolution — the machine suddenly became usable! And even better, it didn’t have any consumer-oriented junk clogging it up. It was what Windows should’ve been from the start.

Back in the day, I really liked the NT4/95 UI. Although I think that Windows 7 was a real improvement. Otherwise, I grew to really hate NT4. During my training, I used a desktop running it for a couple of months, and the complete lack of USB support was a real pain.

During my training, I worked - for a couple of months - on a web application where the test/development environment ran on a Sun machine running Solaris 8, and eventually I install Cygwin/X on my desktop (which ran, can you dig it, Windows 2000!) to start a CDE session and work from there. That grey/pink look somehow looked both butt-ugly and incredibly stylish. ;-)

Someone told me that the classic theme went away in window 8/8.1/10, made me kind of sad because I too always changed to the classic theme.

The "best GUI ever" can't possibly have such a horrid overlapping mishmash of methods for accessing various control panels and system settings.

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