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jnsaff2

This is M$ doing its tik-tok releases.

XP - decent

Vista - horrorshow

7 - alright (compared to vista)

8 - horrorshow

10 - alright (compared to 8)

11 - horrorshow

Personally I will never use it unless I really need to and then kicking and screaming but that is my observation.

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Vista SP2 was better than 7.

At least Vista had a real start menu. Yeah, early Vista was rough, but by SP2 all the problems were fixed.

FWIW, it’s “tick-tock.”

Eh, I don't agree.

NT 3.51 — solid

NT 4.0, 2000 & XP — less, less and less solid

Vista — premature

7 — ok

8 — borked

10 & 11 — untouchable

2000 was pretty good really, more solid than 3.51 even

I hear the era of GDI being run in kernel mode was...not good for stability or security, but I rarely used 2000 and never used NT 4.0 so perhaps there are better mouthpieces than myself.

By W2K a lot of problems had been fixed, and on the other hand 3.51 was still a bit early and wobbly in other areas. I thought GDI was still in the kernel?

Well Vista removed support for kernel-mode printer drivers (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/pr...), Vista introduced the WDDM model for video drivers in user-mode, 8 removed support for XDDM so I guess one could say that by 8, things had come full circle.

This cycle doesn't work anymore. Windows 10 wasn't a normal release, it has been around for 6 years, and has at least 3 major updates(with many small ones). Windows 7 was around for ~3 years, and had one update before it was replaced with Windows 8.

That! It started before XP so...

Allow to fix your list :

XP - decent

Vista - horrorshow

7 - alright (compared to vista)

8 - Not too bad

8.1 - alright

10 - dumpster fire

11 - another dumpster fire

Yes, W10 is/was kindof a garbage. W11 is going to be worse. The only reason I still use Win is for work purposes, otherwise I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole

I completely agree with this list. Although Windows 8 had a bad desktop UI, it was easily mostly fixed with Classic Shell at the time (these days it is Open Shell as Classic Shell is not updated any more). What Windows 10 has now is a better UI, but it has all this background stuff and telemetry which screws any performance for long periods of time, other times it is fine. But I have had to have performance monitoring tools open all the time to see what is going through my hard drive. It is that bad that I have resource monitor open all the time, just out of habit, because of how often there is Windows telemetry stuff or update medic service or even stuff which tries to measure power usage of programs in Windows when I am running it on a desktop. This is all stuff built into Windows installed by Microsoft, not 3rd party stuff. I have been able to deal with this by bypassing the haphazard protections MS put into place to stop me turning that stuff off, if they truly manage to stop me using my PC the way I want, not allowing me to disable the stuff I don't like, then it will become to unbearable to use Windows. The only reason it isn't unbearable is the protections against turning stuff off can be bypassed (not that they haven't tried to stop it).

With Win 11 requiring SecureBoot and the Trusted Platform Module turned on, it is a hard no for me. I like having control over my PC.

and even before:

9x - please no!

2000 - great

ME - oh god, make it stop!

95 was a paradigm shift, 98 had batteries included for the internet, but 98se and 2000 server are the best OSes MS ever put out.

95/98/ME were operating on a different kernel than the NT line (which 2000 fell under). The difference really being that the NT kernel was targeting pretty much exclusively businesses, while the 9x line was targeting home users and some business users. They merged (with the NT kernel winning out) in XP, which targeted both home and business users.

ME was not an upgrade path from 2000 even though it came out after 2000, it was an upgrade path for 98.

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