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Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

My first MS OS was DOS 2.x (forgot the exact point release...). I remember going to Costco as a kid and getting excited whenever a new version of DOS, and later Windows came out because each and every one of them was a true upgrade in every sense of the word. They built things for the users and it showed. I even got to beta test Windows 95 and was blown away when it came out. The last good OS MS released was Windows XP. After that the trend was clear. They were no-longer building stuff for users and instead were building for companies to take advantage of users. MS has completely lost my trust and I doubt they will ever get it back.

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There’s an old joke that if you ask people to pinpoint the golden age of Saturday Night Live, they’ll give you an answer that coincides with whenever they were in high school. It’s less true now in the era of on-demand streaming of the entire backlog, but for the longest time people would simply remember when SNL was fresh and new and exciting.

Funnily enough, I see the same thing playing out with computers, operating systems, the internet, and video games. People identify the peak as some time when they were younger and it was all new and exciting. Everything was downhill since then.

Talk to younger people and they’ll already tell you that Windows 10 was actually the GOAT and they won’t comprehend any fascination with Windows XP. That was the junky old OS they had to deal with on old computers once.

What seems to be happening (to me) is roughly every other generation MS makes massive changes to the OS which most people hate for being different, then they release a new version of the OS which is just basically polishing those features, maybe walking a couple back, and that becomes the "beloved" version of windows.

People hated Vista, and loved 7. Yet 7 was really just vista with a bit of polish. What changed is when 7 came out the average computer capabilities had gone up significantly.

People hated 8, but loved 10. The only real difference between the two is MS dropping the weird tablet mode that nobody wanted/asked for.

People currently hate 11, I suspect 12 will be loved mostly because MS will back off a bit on some of the new innovative UI changes and advertising everywhere.

7 had very clearly optimized what was bloated and inefficient in Vista. It wasn't just that PCs were more powerful, there were many cases of 7 running better on systems that Vista would struggle with. The minimum requirements for 7 dropped considerably

Personally I think 98, 2000, XP, 7, and to a lesser 10, were all stellar releases from Microsoft. None of those would be the GOAT, but the closest in my mind was 7, which dropped when I was doing tech journalism and I had the time and space to poke at it in an extended fashion

> The minimum requirements for 7 dropped considerably

Nope. They were raised.

Vista's minimum requirements were [1]

    A modern processor (at least 800MHz)
    512 MB of system RAM memory
    A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable

7's [2]

    a 1 GHz or faster processor
    1 GB (32-bit OS) or 2 GB (64-bit OS) of RAM,
    16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit) available disk space
    a DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver.

[1] https://techjourney.net/windows-vista-minimum-and-recommende...

[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...

What changed was the availability/cost of hardware and much improved graphics driver situation. Vista RTM had some serious driver performance issues thanks to the new WDDM. Although resolved later in it's lifecycle, it was too late to shed that stigma.

Plus Vista's UAC was far too intrusive.

> Plus Vista's UAC was far too intrusive.

I agree, but I think that technology journalists were too harsh on this aspect of Vista. It was Microsoft's only really serious attempt at shoring up single-user security on Windows, and I think that its poor reception contributed to Microsoft neglecting to make any improvements thereafter. xkcd.com/1200 is still embarrassing relevant over a decade later.

I think it was too early really. These days everyone bugs you with confirmation screens. IOS, macOS, Android all do it too.

But in the vista days security was not yet so much on the radar for most people. In fact even for companies. I remember working for a company where all the laptops had the same local admin password which was the company name + "123". I'm not exaggerating. There was also no full disk encryption used. These were also the days most websites would use plain http.

With that in mind I just don't think the importance was clear yet to most users. They just saw the negatives, not the benefits. Post Stuxnet and Wannacry/NotPetya things are really different.

Ps: it wasn't like that for all of course. I also worked for another company in the late 90s that had all their laptops equipped with windows NT 4.0 with full disk encryption (aftermarket of course as it wasn't yet built in), managed admin account and the whole shebang.

Vista was absolutely unusable at that minimum configuration, but 7 was at its.

Time has probably colored my memory some. But pound for pound 7 ran better than Vista on equivalent hardware.

I can't think of the "why", but I never got to tinker with 7. I think I jumped from XP to 8. I remember I had installed "Longhorn" for fun on a secondary PC, but I stayed at 8 and 8.1 (with ClassicShell) for many many years. I only jumped to 10 when I realized that my 2015 laptop can live and thrive even today with Win10Pro due to their amazing RAM/CPU performance (with some heavy fine-tuning)(black viper!![0],[1] even if the pages no longer exist I still keep them on my favorites!!)

  [0]: https://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-8-1-service-configurations/
  [1] http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-10-service-configurations/

It was said/suggested on SecurityNow from someone in the audience that "hey why don't you use Windows 20YY Server? It's like your home/pro Windows but without the shitware" (loosely reworded by me)

> The minimum requirements for 7 dropped considerably

Typical nonsense people believe because it feels true.

Vista was perfectly fine. The problem was trying to run a 2006 OS on a 2001 machine during a time of both great stagnation in OEMs and great progress overall.

I used Windows Vista beta as my primary OS on my new computer that summer and that thing was amazing.

> People currently hate 11, I suspect 12 will be loved mostly because MS will back off a bit on some of the new innovative UI changes and advertising everywhere.

Oh I'm sure it will be radically different.

I expect they will rename windows to "Copilot" or Windows Copilot" just like they have done with most of their other products like Microsoft 365. I'm not even joking.

They just seem so hell-bent on destroying their existing branding, even more than they normally are. Looks like they have a huge fear of missing that AI boat and becoming irrelevant.

At the same time they are building a catalogue that's so difficult to understand because everything is called Copilot now. I've even seen their own sales people get confused about what's what.

Copilot is sort of a better name for an operating system powered by AI than Windows.

Personally I don't care what they name their services because I've already determined I want nothing more to do with them.

It's not powered by AI though. It's just got a bunch of teasers and upselling ads for AI cloud services. Doesn't really have much to do with the OS.

The same with office, there was no point in renaming it to Copilot especially because the standard license doesn't even come with the Copilot features in office.

> People hated 8, but loved 10.

I think the pattern holds for Windows 7 and Vista. I don't know anyone who remembers Windows 10 fondly, and on a personal level I hated both 8 and 10.

I also don't share your optimism regarding Windows 12. You or I might consider switching to Linux, but 95% of the population has never heard of Linux and even fewer will ever install it. Then there is MacOS, which is gated behind hardware that is prohibitively expensive, as well as having a limited selection of software available; also a non-starter. Microsoft isn't going to back off of user-hostile practices unless they lose a series of anti-trust suits. They were already forced to allow users to uninstall Edge in the EU and they region-locked the functionality so that users outside of the EU were still stuck with Edge. They are in the mass surveillance game for the long haul.

I see what you mean.. but if you take a look at vista vs 7..

Microsoft shoved glass panels, widgets and such down the user's throat in Vista. It was a new look and they wanted to make you realise it. Without spinning a fresh 7 machine now, I'm certain it was very toned down.

But, I could be very wrong about this :D Last time I used Windows was XP (I mean, granted last week) because nostalgia is a real thing :D

Edit: I can't reply (not sure why, thread too deep?) but @cogman10, you're right! My memory is bad :(

> Without spinning a fresh 7 machine now, I'm certain it was very toned down.

I think they were roughly the same

Vista: https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Windows-Vista-Ne...

Windows 7: https://blog.thinprint.com/uploads/tp/sites/6/2019/08/319410...

I never tried with Vista but I customized the appearance of Windows 7 on my old computer and it looked nothing like this. I remember lots of people hated the frosted glass look when it first released, and personally I never got used to it. The OS peaked aesthetically with Windows 2000 and has been on a steady decline since then.

>Without spinning a fresh 7 machine now, I'm certain it was very toned down

Your memories are not serving you well. Windows 7 was very glass and very aero when it was first released.

You can disable the transparency and fake glossiness, but then it's just a pale blue glossy glass colour instead of transparent.

  1) Install any Windows version from the past decade in any machine
  2) Go to 'performance' and remove all visuals
  3) download and install ClassicShell to have a decent Start button
  4) download and use (most are portable) any Privacy settings tool
  5) find, download and install WindowsFirewallControl v4.9.x.x and use it on MediumFiltering with "Display Notifications" (you get the 'ZoneAlarm experience')
  6) Uninstall all the crapware and disable many services (I use SysInternals Autoruns64)(Winternals for the older ones)
  7) Happy Days!!

Wow, that's a lot more work than my Fedora setup.

Windows is only free if you don't value your time, huh?

Microsoft put bread on my table. I started working in a company that was operating 99% of their servers with MS OS. I don't see it that "I am wasting time", I see it that there is this tech called "Windows" and the more I know about Registry, DLLs, etc. is making me better at my job.

If Fedora setup puts food on your table, go for it!! I 'bet' on Microsoft for my career and it has taken me around the world multiple times, so yeah :)

Tbh I don't change machines 'that' often. My laptop is from 2015. My desktop is 3? 4? years old, and I won't be changing either in the next 5-6 years, they do 'ok' for home use.

But every now and then (couple of years) I do buy some second-hand cheap Surface, or HP Elite, or similar Win tablets, I set them up, and keep them on the side (OS, and Firefox only) just in case someone will need an urgent laptop, or I travel somewhere and I want a 'burner' machine with zero data/sw in it.

> Microsoft shoved glass panels, widgets and such down the user's throat

Please listen to yourself. It's just a style, they didn't kill your dog. The UI was fine, beautiful even, especially coming from Lego XP — which if you think about it was really tacky, literally an RGB palette.

7 has significant kernel improvements that dramatically improves its performance, as well as huge changes to its graphics system that heavily reduced memory usage. (Data that was mirror in system ram wasn't anymore, dropping local RAM usage.)

If you threw enough horse power at, vista could be fast, but it would always end up using more resources than windows 7.

> The only real difference between the two is MS dropping the weird tablet mode that nobody wanted/asked for.

I mean, that's a significant difference. It was well justified to hate Windows 8 when they screwed up the main UI for the entire OS as badly as they did.

Same thing has been observed way earlier for music: the golden age of pop music was always everyone's teenage/high school years.

That’s been noted but doesn’t change the fact that tech products have become increasingly user-hostile over the last two decades, while QA spending is way down.

Personally I thought the first twenty-five years of SNL were great, and it is good recently.

The wasteland is less rad if your born into it?

> The last good OS MS released was Windows XP.

I'm reminded of how much people hated it when it came out. Post Vista it was widely liked. A lot of people are also nostalgic of 7 now. I wonder if we'll have a batch of people nostalgic for 10 or 11 in a decade in the same vein. I doubt it, but who knows. The old rule was "every other release is loved/hated", which held until at least 10 (8 was hated, 10 was somewhat accepted). I also remember that 10 was supposed to be "the last version of Windows".

Windows XP was a downer for many when it came out because it wasn't Windows 98SE++ (and Windows ME was a flop) - it was Windows 2000 with a "fisher price" skin.

For those in the know, that was great. Windows XP + classic theme + drivers (even if you had to find the W2k drivers) was incredibly stable and performant.

But it took a few years for games to catch up and get the updates, and so for the "tech oriented" crowd (which were often gamers), it took a bit to catch on.

But its longevity is a tribute to how "good it was" and how hard it was to improve from it. Vista introduced more stability at the expense of requiring new drivers, so they re-released Vista a few years later as 7 (there's really no major differences between Vista and 7 except a few years of upgrades to drivers and hardware).

The five years between XP and Vista certainly didn't help matters, either. If you wait that long, you better be willing to support it for decades. Windows XP's last update was 18 years after it was shipped.

Windows XP was the beginning of the downhill slide for me because it was the first "phone home" version of Windows.

I'm not gonna gainsay anyone who says it was good, I'm sure they have lots of legitimate fond memories of Space Cadet Pinball, Half-Life 2, etc. But the Windows XP era was the first one where "what's happening with Windows" just passed me by. I was through with Microsoft's shenanigans starting around then.

Hehe even today I still remember FCKGW and using it on completely legitimate copies just to avoid having to find whatever the actual one was.

Yeah I missed out on using what I call the "FuCKinG Windows" code. I was able to commit to Linux full time, even find work in it.

The funny thing about XP is that it indirectly made running 2000 as a daily driver a better proposition, because all of a sudden consumer hardware and software was being made to work on an NT kernel.

XP also had the benefit of riding Moore's law for so long that the "high hardware requirements" became lower than the cheapest hardware you could buy halfway through its useful lifetime, which helps with its perception.

I remember editing XP drive INF files so that I could install them on W2K, which I did for a year or so before finally moving to XP with a new system.

Vista suffered from being stuck in PM hell. MS was working on so many new features for longhorn that were never fully finished and later scrapped. The only real significant (and important) change was the HAL.

It introduced volume mixer (which stays kinda beloved and sought out even now) (and also WASAPI), search in start (hit start and type, which is now everywhere), snipping tool (which is made even better in windows 11), etc., there's actually a bunch of features there that either get overlooked or misattributed to windows 7, which is kinda interesting. Check out this article about them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista

I remember the start menu search and related search things (both for windows and Mac OS, remember Sherlock?) being so absolutely dog slow and even worse after upgrade/fresh install.

That all went away as SSDs came on the market, but it was a noticeable "downgrade" from teh snappy.

WDDM was a huge improvement. UAC was also an improvement against shatter attacks but too aggressive in Vista.

That was another thing Windows 7 "won" on by just being later; by the time it came out many of the major programs that had huge UAC issues were updated and resolved.

Oh yeah that filesystem whatever it was called sounded really revolutionary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS - it's sad, there really hasn't been much done in filesystems, but there's a lot that could be done.

I would've loved Vista if it looked like the early Longhorn builds.

I'm one of the few people who liked 8. I didn't mind the start screen and I was disappointed when 10 took away my Charms bar and related gestures, and remain livid over the Windows Update/telemetry situation. I understood what they were doing: with the phone and tablet OSes, the goal was a unified ecosystem like Apple's. Effortless movement between form factors. They didn't do themselves any favors by only sort of delivering on that promise, but the main problem was that no one explained the fundamental dynamic: Apple is a cult, Microsoft is a jail. So while the users of the former's OSes will happily rationalize or ignore even negative changes, Microsoft's users are always somewhat resentful, no matter what. This was the curse of their effective monopoly. Something finally snapped with 8's failure, giving us MS' apparent abandonment of any pretense and an evolution toward a Google-like "users are the product" attitude.

The Ghost of Bushes Past continue to haunt us, I suppose.

While I liked Win 7 more, I didn't mind Win 8.1. But convergence won't happen. Everyone is quick to forget that the devices are actually in different physical forms when interacting with them.

I think Gnome 3 is the most successful, because their utilities and first party apps have the right kind of compromise while not trying to enforce their view on other software workflow. iPad OS would have been great too, if they went for a free floating windows management and some widget redesign instead of the awkward stage manager.

The tiles thing that Microsoft tried for one of the iterations of Windows Phone was actually quite nice, I forget the OS that kind of went with that, but - they never doubled down on it and abandoned that phone OS soon afterwards.

Don't think I've ever encounter someone that didn't become nostalgic for 10 after having to switch to 11. So many pointless UI changes, and just like with 8 none of them are necessary to force the user to use beyond some incessant need to dictate how users do things on the part of Microsoft.

I still use 7 on my offline pcs. Its still such a fantastic operating system and I don't see us getting another like it from ms. I'm one of those nostalgia folks who can't move on. People are certainly feeling the same way 10 to 11.

That rule can always be gamed too, heh. I felt it went 8 bad, 8.1 good, 10 bad. Then 11 broke the pattern.

Consider trying out Linux+KDE, if the reason to use 7 isn't specific software on older hardware. It feels like a continuation of Windows 7 as a desktop for the most part.

It really depends how you configure it. It has an amazing wealth of configuration settings and that's before diving into the whole addon rabbit hole. This is really what I love about KDE. Everyone else is now going for the apple opinionated design "Just use it like we meant it to be used" philosophy. Even other Linux desktops like gnome (in fact gnome is one of the worst offenders)

With KDE you can simply align it with your own opinions.

I really have not seen anything material since windows 7 that would meet the bar of major improvement. Windows 7 with bug & security fixes, adding support for new hardware standards and SW developments, and feature evolution would be superior to what we have today IMO. Prior to win7 all the revolutionary "coming next" things either became impractical or were dropped.

I have a desktop that still runs all tripe-A games and is my main development machine running win10 that MS says is a boat anchor come the fall; this will be my last windows machine.

Microsoft has been pretty good to me as a developer (despite some of the technologies intentionally designed to do nothing but distract and consume attention) but the consumer side is a pathological shit-show and appears to really hate people (or at least love money more). MS looks a lot like the White House these days.

I knew someone who hated it and would instead install windows 2000 on everything. And he would do so claiming defiance of Microsoft for ruining the most perfect operating system only for money. Then when 7 came out he proclaimed he would never use a new windows again and remain on 2000 forever. I never really got why he was so upset. For me I didn’t like the interface that was in vista or in windows 8. But it wasn’t ever the end of the world. And this was all in the context of playing games! He didn’t develop software or anything. He also hated steam.

Windows XP was the last good OS, but Windows 2k was the last one that really added a lot of user centered features and usability.

Yeah a lot of people stayed on 98 SE2 until the XP service packs were out and XP was solid.

> They were no-longer building stuff for users and instead were building for companies to take advantage of users.

This may be netlore at this point, but IIRC, a big reason why XP pushed for product keys was for cancelled experiments with subscription pricing (or at least updates for paying customers only). That plug was pulled before launch due to lack of widespread broadband infrastructure for the downloads. Continuous updates are a nightmare enabled by modern CDNs and cable.

> The last good OS MS released was Windows XP. After that the trend was clear. They were no-longer building stuff for users and instead were building for companies to take advantage of users.

What was wrong with Windows 7? Windows Vista was poorly designed but it wasn't intentionally user-hostile. I don't remember the bloatware and design gimmicks starting until Windows 8.

>>getting excited whenever a new version of DOS, and later Windows came out

And installing the new version required 20+ 3.5 inch 'floppies'

Wasn't Windows before XP SP2 or Vista absurdly insecure?

One thing I couldn’t pinpoint, until recently, was the little bit of excitement that I felt as kid for the iterative box art of Windows releases.

3.1 was a white box. 95 was sky and clouds. 98 was more cloudy clouds. NT 4.0 was sky turning into space.

You can imagine my disappointment when ME and 2k were just white boxes.

Very tangential, but I had the same kind of intrigue for Maxis games where SIM was stylized as a colour and the game name with its own font.

Why are boomers so stubborn and adamant about things they form opinions of and won't change their mind, even when they're wrong? Is it a lack of intelligence? Or too much pride? Both?

Kick rocks, by the way.

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