Nowadays Windows is filled with adware and is fairly slow, but it wasn’t always like this. Was there a particular time where a change occurred?
Satya Nadella.
Windows 8 marked the point in my opinion. It’s when they tried to start locking down the operating system and focusing heavily on the cloud. The adware began in this era as well.
probably 8 or 10
I agree on the ads and bundled services, but the “windows is slow” stuff is horseshit. A tight build of Linux boots more quickly no doubt, but a fresh Win10 or 11 install, even with bloat, is up in under 30 seconds, and runs swiftly out of the box. This isn’t “slow” by any definition.
Again, let’s hate the other shit, let’s hate on that together.
Yeah I might have phrased that wrong. On my computer windows uses about 40% of my laptop cpu with nothing else running, but I do agree that it isn’t really show
That seems very odd to me. My installs never got that bad. Not calling you a liar, just saying your out of the box experience was way shittier than mine.
Windows 7 exists, and there’s no need to improve upon perfection. But there’s no money in releasing nothing, so they release ad-filled “upgrades” to bring in more money from the doofuses who buy it.
How bad is security if you still have Windows 7 installed today?
Looks like 3% of windows users worldwide could help answer that question. Well, up to 3%… guessing not too many of them are too savvy.
I try to not connect mine to the internet anymore
I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that those machines are corporate owned and running legacy systems that are hanging on by a thread.
Every year someone talks about replacing Ol’ Smoky but the new system would need to go through validation and that costs time and money so they limp along for another year
Yeah, every UI change since 7 has been for the worse, increasing the number of steps required to get work done.
I heard someone refer to what happened from XP to 10 as “onioneering” because they just added layers.
TIL Windows is an ogre…
To be fair, 10’s Settings screen makes dealing with wifi and bluetooth much easier than 7
Yeah but they had to do that because bluetooth became much more commonplace between 7 and 10.
Although I’m not sure if it was like that out of the box or it was improved with an update.
I wasn’t using bluetooth with 7, so you could be right. But if I need to fiddle with wifi beyond just changing what AP I’m connected to, the network settings I typically want to look at, eg disabling adapters or manually setting an IP address, were available in fewer steps in 7 versus 10.
This is something Apple got right. OS X 10.0 was good and they’ve made lots of incremental changes but didn’t just arbitrarily change the whole “centered application dock at the bottom and menu bar at the top” situation. When new form factors emerged, they just made a new interface and didn’t try to hot glue a mouse/touchpad OS and touchscreen OS together for the fuck of it.
Depending on who you ask, Vista or 8.
+1 for 8
That’s where they started to suck
NT 3.5 was the last version I’d consider “good” without reservation.
Vista, no question
They must’ve stopped with Windows 11 because I’m still on Windows 10 Pro and don’t see even a fraction of the BS I keep hearing about Windows having.
I think they tried on 8 to make something and it was a flop then they flipped their whole business model upside down when they released 10
I suppose the weird surprise lesson of the Windows 8 fiasco is no matter how badly they bollixed it up, they wouldn’t lose enough customers that they could afford break a lot more of the user experience than they ever originally thought.
Even Vista, while people had issues*, still provided a largely familiar interface and didn’t go out of its way to break muscle memory and traditional workflows.
IMO, Vista wasn’t as bad as is commonly held. A lot of the problem was that it was more resource-intensive than previous systems-- it really asked for decent graphics cards and 2Gb memory, but they sold a lot of cheap machines with 512Mb and crappy shared-memory chipsets that only qualified as “Vista Basic Capable” so that the manufacturers wouldn’t have to formally declare them obsolete. Some drivers had teething trouble, but switching to 64 bit was going to have growing pains anyway.
From the very beginning, it always had particular features which were designed to make things worse for the users for some business reason for Microsoft. After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done - it wasn’t slow or lacking important features or unstable (relatively speaking, at least), and so the only changes being made to it from then on were adding crappiness to it for some reason related to business priorities or just simple stupidity. And so, it entered its slide.
After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done
There were a lot of big things happening in computer hardware: migration to 64-bit instruction sets and memory addressing, multicore processors, the rise of the GPU. The security paradigm also shifted to less trust between programs, with a lot of implementation details on encryption and permissions.
So I’d argue that Windows has some pretty different things going on under the hood from what it was 20 years ago.
Microsoft has always made windows good… … … For them.
To be honest I’d go as far back as XP and say that was fine, 7 was also but I’ve never liked the start menu etc since and the forced updates really just wind me up.
According to South Park the movie, Windows 98
Windows runs software written for my company in 2005 without any real issues. It is backwards compatible for 25 years, it destroys any other OS in compatibility only and the actual customer of Windows, businesses, value that more than anything else.
That’s not the question though, they may have backwards compatibility as a sacred cow, but the theme of their changes as of 8 and newer has broadly been more about trying to force other Microsoft agendas rather than trying to just make a better product.
Though I have had some older titles that work better with wine, or even older where I need dosbox to run it.
You are still talking about video games, their primary consumer are large companies with an Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. With this you can be guaranteed that your SQL2005 app that runs your multi million dollar revenue membership organization or financial research company can keep making money without too much investment or getting walled in by one or two linux specialists with systems no one else understands. You can keep legacy windows programs running on Server 2022 with people who are just over breathing in their level of competency.
On the usability side for big companies windows has gotten way easier to use. Windows 10/11 introduces the CSP or “Configuration Service Provider” (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/mdm/) model of MDM (mobile device management) which enables them to move from really clunky 2000s era technology called System Center and Active Directory (LDAP directory + local DNS server) to a SAAS management model bundled with Microsoft 365 (the most profitable product at Microsoft, they count 365 consumption in their Azure revenue stream when reporting to investors). If your computer is intune managed and signed into with an Entra (the Microsoft SAAS identity provider) you get windows with no ads, no games or bloat ware and you can get to making boss money ASAP.
You’re the consumer which likely doesn’t want to upgrade or spend money so a huge liability and part of an old strategy of theirs to lock people in ath ome so they were trained for the office, they moved to giving out subscriptions to Microsoft 365 (bundled with your Minecraft account to hook you young) and getting you dependent on their cloud services. If you’re talking about Windows for video games, Microsoft wants you to buy an XBox. If you aren’t going to buy an XBox they want to make sure you subscribe to them monthly from Playstation then.
On the linux side there is no alternatives for Active Directory or Intune and SCCM. Companies I’ve worked for with significant unix and linux infrastructure still ran Active Directory for the user accounts. This is boring tech no one cares about and we’ll never get an open source community to create and maintain it because I only deal with this for my boss and when I come home I use linux on my home computer too.
It’s weird to not see any posts about Azure. I remember watching a keynote from Microsoft’s CEO several years ago where he explicitly said the company’s focus was on Azure and cloud applications, and that the role of Windows was simply to get you there. That’s it. This is also inline with comments about Win7 being the last good OS because that’s about when the transition started.
Vista
7 was good though
7 was the peak of the curve, with everything starting a downward trend with 8.
7 was genuinely the best windows operating system. It was stable, slick, easy to use, and generally unobtrusive to what you were trying to do, and you didnt have to do daily reboots or regular reformats to clean up after it like you had to do with all its predecessors.
When was Windows 1 released?
