At the time, people would endlessly complain about every new version or even small change, too. I don't remember the complaining to be worse for the (in hindsight) worse versions. Plus it's only the complaints that you hear about, very few people will rave about how great something is. Personally I thought that Windows 7 was a majors step backwards from XP and avoided it, skipping straight to 8, which I thought was great.

Vista was huge improvement (or say Win7 basics was made here), but just too heavy in 2006.

> Everything else was a step backwards from the previous version.

You're claiming that XP was worse than ME?

Windows 95 was no great shakes, but it was way better than Windows For Workgroups 3.11, which is where I jumped off for OS/2 and then Slackware.