So is there a light, Windows 9x-like (so really really fast and responsive) shell for Windows 10?
I cannot believe how unresponsive Windows 10 is, the menus, windows, all opening with so huge delays, it's a disgrace.
I cannot believe how unresponsive Windows 10 is, the menus, windows, all opening with so huge delays, it's a disgrace.
Notice the lack of latency, notice how it flies and there's no delay on displaying the widgets and typing on a text editor or a word processor.
The Win95 Explorer is the last that doesn't have Internet Explorer embedded in it. It keeps the whole start menu in memory. Starting with Win98 (or was it Win95OSR2? - can't remebember) they added IE into everything. From then on, opening the start menu requires a disk read.
Also, you can't really experience the no-latency speed of Win95 if you use virtualization. You probably got used to Win7/10/11 latency so much, that even WinXP with virtualisation feels fast. Trust me: that isn't fast.
On XP, well, with the classic theme it can run pretty fast.
But I woudn't use propietary OSes today except for nostalgia experiments on secluded VM's.
I'm a linux home user, does Windows still do that slow-down-gradually thing?
Not in my experience. My installs go years without a reformat and reboots are usually only due to updates.
I can't remember if the shell was enough, but I remember that all the store apps were disabled, search in the start menu didn't search online, no cortana stuff, it was actually quite usable.
You might need the non-home edition to do some of the those things, I think group policies were involved. It's been a long time though, I've been using Linux for everything ever since Proton became good enough for gaming.
[0] http://www.classicshell.net/ (not https) [1] https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
https://tweaker.ramensoftware.com/
It is working on Win 10, but not supported om Win 11 anymore.
The lightweight app lets me define the taskbar behavior.
Like the login screen, for example. Lock the PC (Windows Key + L) followed by CTRL key to activate the password prompt, and immediately put in my password ... then the 1st one or two characters from my password won't usually make it into the password input.