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> 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?)

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.

use libre

> 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.

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.

Ok, you're right, it's irrelevant to a discussion about the OS; the point I was trying to make is that this old machine is robust, it can be taken apart, completely, and screwed back together, and still work fine. Not all machines can do that.

But that's not inherently some property of it being an old machine. One could have an ancient machine where that's nearly impossible to do with proprietary fan sizes and headers and have a machine built yesterday which is easy to do.

Just the other month I replaced my laptop battery (not removable but easily done), fans, repasted the cpu and cleaned out the heat sink.

It gave a 5 year old laptop a completely new lease of life.

Nothing you're describing is unusual.

My primary machine isn't Windows 7 anymore, but I have a Windows 7 machine I keep around for a particular kind of work. I access it with Remote Desktop and keep it in an isolated network segment.

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.)

> the abominable 'ribbon' that no other windows app ever emulated

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?

Anything not made by Microsoft?

I've seen a number of applications especially around that time move to ribbon or ribbon-like UIs. Pretty much all of Corel's apps moved to a ribbon. Redgate tools. Solidworks. AutoCAD. Foxit PDF. NitroPDF. Lots of healthcare apps like Epic. I dunno, I've probably seen several dozens more odd domain specific software suites with it over the decades. I've also seen a lot of in-house custom apps made with the ribbon UI toolkit.

What version(s) of Corel's apps used the ribbon? Not CorelDraw 2024 according to this screenshot:

https://www.coreldraw.com/static/cdgs/product_content/cdgs/e...

(I'm a happy user of CorelDraw X7 on my Win7 machine ;-)

Visual Studio does not have a ribbon UI.

> last version before the abominable 'ribbon' that no other windows app ever emulated

Isn't the modern (Windows 10, don't know about 11) file explorer UI a "ribbon" UI?

Of sorts. Not a full ribbon like in Office.

Windows 8 and 10 have a real ribbon, Windows 11 went back to a normal toolbar.

I am entertaining an idea to acquire the same setup for recreational game development using older tools and libraries. Have you followed any guides or do you have any recommendations where to start? Also how reliable those older mobos? I have heard that capacitors are usually close to a malfunction stage, have you had any issues with hardware so far? Thanks.

I use win64devkit on Windows Vista. Modern and up to date devkit and at the same time very lean, portable and practical. https://nullprogram.com/blog/2021/03/11/

Motherboard is from 2009, is on every day, sometimes stays on for a week. Not one problem so far; not sure what I would do if it failed though!

Ignore the haters, and just keep enjoying how good life is on it.