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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Personally, Win XP was the pinnacle of Windows. Everything has gone downhill since then.

I call it the start of the decline, as it was the first version of Windows which featured on-line activation, legitimising the practice in the wider industry.

Microsoft online product activation was first introduced in Office 97, a few years before WinXP.

Where do you have this information from? As far as I know, product activation for office started with Office XP ("2002").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_activation#Microsoft

Win2K was the first one for which I've heard about it personally, probably because that's when it started to show up en masse in developed markets.

Thank you, was not aware of that. There was no mention on this Wikipedia article that I used to double-check:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Product_Activation

Let's rephrase @endgame's comment as "Windows XP and Office XP were the first versions of their respective series where product activation was mandatory on all retail editions." Point still stands I guess.

To me it was Windows 7. XP was great, 7 was amazing. (Reference, NT4 was my first Windows).

7 also had the most flexible/capable iteration of the Windows theme engine, which enabled the creation of a wide variety of high quality third party themes you could use if Aero wasn't quite your thing but you also didn't want to drop back to Win9x look.

8 gutted the Windows theme engine because most of it wasn't needed to render flat squares and it still has yet to recover.

7 for me too, and my first was 3.1.

As long as you turn off the Fisher Price interface

It wasn't so bad as long as you turned the window title height down to normal. Then it was nice because you wouldn't prick your finger on sharp edges anymore.

Out of the box, the extra window title height took up too much room, ugh. But then now there's so much whitespace everywhere.

It’s my fav! Loved the media center ui too.

XP was just 2K with a silly UI; it was a huge regression.

It took, what, 3 clicks to disable Luna and get back to slate grey?

And one more click to disable the XP-style control panel.

OTOH app compatibility in XP was quite a bit better, esp. with games. IIRC that's when Windows first started to experiment with features like virtualized disk and registry writes?

XP, yes, but don't forget the service packs. Win XP sucked SO much when it came out initially. Just burned a lot of resources for seemingly no gain, and it was very unstable, compared to the previous editions we ran at the time. With SP1 it was much better, but that was years after it came out, 2001 vs 2004 I think.

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