God I wish I could replace Windows 11 with Windows 7
Everything works fine and fast; Office 2003 was peak Office (last version before the abominable 'ribbon' that no other windows app ever emulated, which, for such a brilliant idea supposed to revolutionize productivity applications, is a bit strange?); browsers won't update to Manifest V3 so uBlock Origin runs along smoothly; most VST plugins released recently, are compatible with Win7 and those that aren't, usually are bad and bloated.
Just today I upgraded the CPU fan to a new one that required to completely take apart the whole casing (because the fan has a plastic mount that needs to be on the other side of the motherboard); doing this, and putting it all together, took maybe 40 minutes? And everything restarted just perfectly afterwards. I love this machine.
I have a much newer PC running Ubuntu, but it's just not as good — lots of little annoying details; and a bit unstable.
Isn't the modern (Windows 10, don't know about 11) file explorer UI a "ribbon" UI?
This is a crazy irrelevant example. Why would you expect any other OS to act differently? CPU fans connect with a 4-pin header, it's not like switching out a major component of your system.
It gave a 5 year old laptop a completely new lease of life.
Nothing you're describing is unusual.
Other than, I dunno, Explorer, Paint, WordPad, Visual Studio, Dynamics, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Live Writer, SQL Server Report Builder, Mathematics, and then some.
What other applications were you expecting them to add it to?
https://www.coreldraw.com/static/cdgs/product_content/cdgs/e...
(I'm a happy user of CorelDraw X7 on my Win7 machine ;-)
I've kept the various versions of other software on the machine static, along with the OS. For what I use it for it's very pleasant to use. Muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts that I've built-up over the nearly 15 years I've been using the machine isn't disrespected by developers introducing change for change's sake. Nothing moves around on its own. Nothing changes without my approval. I really like it.
(The physical machine itself is a Ship of Theseus. It's a Dell laptop that has had some combination of donor screens, keyboards, motherboards, batteries, and disks over the years. I really appreciate that, too. The Latitude machines of its era are really easily disassembled and serviced.)
Apparently I'm not alone ;)
I still find the classic menus (with full menus always on) easier to quickly parse than looking at all those icons stretching through the entire width of the window.
Edit: also if you're looking for a lightweight note taking app, try OneNote 2003/2007. Uses 8-32 MB of RAM which was a lot back then but today isn't nothing.
You don't know how terrible Windows 11 is until you start going backwards, peeling off layers of the onion. Once you're back to XP/2000, you're like..oh shit. People spent years thinking about how this would all work. And it's crazy fast. Windows snap into place almost instantly. Sure, search doesn't work, but search doesn't work on Windows 11 reliably either.
Everything you actually need to work? Works better and faster in the old stuff. When I remote into those machines even the remote session feels faster. How does a Windows XP machine running on a 733mhz machine from the last century feel faster at navigating windows and settings and launching programs than my 3k dollar workstation from last year?
On that 733mhz machine with Office 2003, Excel will be open within a few seconds if I double click on it--if you move up to a 1ghz+ machine it opens up so fast it might as well be instant.
BTW: However, i never used the 2003 64-bit version.