Pundits called for the death of the PC. Everything needed to have a touch screen. Microsoft looked at the enormous success of Apple's combined software and hardware businesses, specifically the App Store, and said "We want that.
And so was born the worst version of Windows: an OS built for both desktops and touchscreen laptops that didn't excel on either. An OS that wanted to control and sell all applications through the new Microsoft Store, despite Windows' legacy as an open platform.
Microsoft tried to solve Windows 8's most egregious UI issues with Windows 8. It made Windows 8. The stagnant adoption reflected that. According to NetMarketshare , by spring , right before Windows 10 released, 8 and 8. Windows 10 would pass that percentage within a year. Wes: This was Microsoft at its absolute worst, a lumbering misguided company trying to put its finger in every tech pie and managing to spoil all of them at once. I hated the Windows 8 user interface on PCs, but I'll give Microsoft credit for one thing: it was actually pretty great on smartphones.
Windows Phone deserved better! Tyler: Wes, no. I had a friend who loved his Windows Phone, but think of the cost we'd be paying now had Microsoft successfully gone down Apple's path. Morgan: I always thought it was weird that the "Metro" interface was quarantined to its own zone on the Start menu. The best thing I can say about Windows 8 was it eventually became Windows 8. That was the point at which I could tell friends running into compatibility issues in Windows 7 that, don't worry, Windows 8 isn't that bad anymore.
Chris : As soon as I saw all the rectangles and squares I thought: "I am in deep trouble. You know it's not a good sign when a version of Windows lasts less than a year. Windows Millennium Edition is truly a perfect name for a poorly aged of-its-time piece of software. Seriously, ME is so , its installation CD was holographic.
Information superhighway, here we come!! It was, in the sense that it collected all the bugs and problems of those versions and combined them into one perfectly crappy operating system. In practice it looked about the same as Windows 98, and none of the new features it introduced did much to compensate for the infamous instability.
ME crashed. It crashed a lot. It made Windows 95 look stable. At least, that was the experience for a lot of people—if you scored the driver and hardware lottery, it may have run just as well as Windows It ended a groundbreaking era of Windows with a whimper, but XP came in with a bang just barely a year later.
That's what I associate with Windows ME. A lot of anime VCDs were watched in that thing. It also had that amazing skin that was a green face with speakers for ears and a visualizer in the brain case.
Wes: Basically all I remember about ME is that a family friend had a computer running it, and it reliably crashed pretty much every time I used it. This was the version of Windows for chumps, while those in the know landed on the rock solid Windows until XP came along and got its first few patches.
These days I think people look back on Vista with some sympathy. As Linus Tech Tips argued , Vista didn't entirely deserve its bad rap. There were certainly some painful performance issues at the start; Vista was certainly more demanding than Windows XP, and some systems that were touted as being able to run Vista really couldn't… or they only could if you turned off all the graphical niceties, like the Aero transparency effects.
And Vista was such a major overhaul of the OS coming from XP, Vista needed entirely new drivers which were slow to arrive. That meant some hardware just didn't work on Vista and many games ran far worse than they did on XP. It was a terrible launch. Oh, and the wonderful User Account Control pop-ups! Yeah, everyone hated those, and no one understood why Vista was taking over your entire screen to warn you every time you tried to change a setting in the control panel or launch a program.
But underneath those very glaring flaws, Vista introduced a huge slew of new features and looked cutting edge compared to XP. It overhauled practically every Windows system from XP. It was a big step forward! In return for that step, you just had to put up with your games running worse, your printer not working, and pop-ups nagging you all the time. The best thing that can be said for Vista is that most of its fundamental improvements returned practically unchanged in Windows 7 just a few years later… and everybody loved them.
Jody: I bought a laptop that came with Vista pre-installed, and it really shouldn't have. That damn OS made it run like arse. Took forever to boot, or do anything really, even with all the swishy nonsense turned off. I'm still mad at Vista like 12 years later. Morgan: Like Jody, my first laptop ever came with Vista. I remember staring at the little clock widget on my desktop while I waited seconds for Minecraft to open. I do not recommend trying to game on a bottom-of-the-line Dell laptop running Vista.
Evan: It's inseparable from the darkness and suffering of Games for Windows Live, for me. GfWL came a year later, in I'd peg it as one of the lowest points in PC gaming's history—Microsoft at its least-competent as a steward for the platform, and at its most meddlesome. Never again. Wes : I was somewhat obsessed with the glassy "Aero" aesthetic of Windows Vista and its glossy take on the taskbar and Start button.
It looked so high tech at the time because, whoa, transparency! I definitely installed a Windows XP skin to mimic Vista's aesthetic, but I held out from actually using the OS for awhile, because it had some fairly heavy system requirements at the time. One of my friends upgraded just to play Halo 2 for PC, which was exclusive to Vista. It wasn't worth it. Tyler: Like Wes, I was really into the look here.
I'd always loved the idea of having little widgets on my desktop, even though I did not then and have never needed a larger clock sitting on the desktop, which I never look at. I guess I just wanted my PC to feel like a control center for, I don't know, someone important.
In the early days, Windows was not popular. Or particularly good. The Macintosh OS was far more robust, and Windows only saw limited use with versions 1. Windows 3. Up until that point, PC users could do some things in Windows, but still had to switch over to the DOS prompt to run many applications.
And Windows 3. You could do more than one thing at a time thanks to smarter memory management! It had Solitaire! This was the point where Windows crossed the threshold from being a kinda-useful add-on to DOS, to being a better, easier way for most people to do things on their computer.
Wes: Yes, youngling, but like most other '90s kids I feel like the OS practically didn't exist until Windows 3. Every computer I used in my early childhood, except the school computer lab Macs, ran Windows 3. Report abuse. Details required :. Cancel Submit. K0MB Independent Advisor. I will do my best to help you. Windows 7 is the lightest and most user-friendly for your laptop, but the updates are finished for this OS. So it's at your risk. Otherwise you can opt for a light version of Linux if you are quite adept with Linux computers.
Like Lubuntu. How satisfied are you with this reply? Along the way, they got a taste of rock-solid Windows NT tech, since the average PCs had just recently become powerful enough to run it well. And run it they did, with many XP fans unwilling to upgrade away from XP for a very long time. Windows 95 introduced many Windows standards that we take for granted today , including File Explorer, Windows keyboard shortcuts, the Recycle Bin, file shortcuts, the modern desktop, and more.
It is the archetype of Windows, distilled: Anyone familiar with Windows today could easily go back and use Windows 95 without any trouble. Few software products have ever been as essential in their time. Windows is an underrated masterpiece —a taste of a stable and more mature Windows that felt ahead of its time for early adopters. In contrast, Windows 7 was more stable than Vista, ran faster on the same hardware , toned down the UAC issues, and refined the Aero interface to make it less flashy and more classy and you could turn it off, if necessary.
Windows 7 has no freemium pack-in games , no advertising on the Start menu, and no pressure to link your account to the cloud. You update when you feel the time is right. With Windows 7 support finally over as of January , you should upgrade to Windows 10 if you are able—but it remains to be seen whether Microsoft will ever match the lean utilitarian nature of Windows 7 ever again.
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